Note that, for better or for worse, relative performance after three years has a lot to do with how the tech market overall happened to be performing at that time.

For example, the companies that I.P.O.'d in 1996 and 1997 tend to do well using this particular timeframe, and the ones that I.P.O.'d in 2006 would be affected negatively.

Those are both terrible metrics. They're sensitive to IPO timing, for a start. Facebook is going public very (!) late, it's already achieved market dominance and very significant revenue. Contrast Microsoft, which went up before Windows 3.0, when they were mostly a software supplier to IBM (their other offerings were distant second place products to market leaders like Wordperfect or Lotus).

And "after 3 years" misses a lot of detail too. Apple looks pretty good in that metric. But their "after 12 years" numbers are a disaster. And of course "after 30 years" looks to be pretty fantastic for them.