Tech Thursday plus Financial Friday: Apple v Microsoft

Last week Apple's market capitalization surpassed Microsoft's, which is pretty amazing. When I read that announcement I was actually shocked. I don't follow that type of thing closely and hadn't realized they were getting close.



When I dug into the numbers I became even more surprised. As the NY Times article on the subject says:

"The companies have comparable revenue, with Microsoft at $58.4 billion and Apple at $42.9 billion. But in their most recent fiscal years, Apple had net income of $5.7 billion, while Microsoft earned $14.6 billion.

"Microsoft has more cash and short-term investments, $39.7 billion, to Apple’s $23.1 billion, which makes the value assigned by the market to Apple, essentially a bet on its future prospects, all the more remarkable."

Are you as surprised as I am that the market is valuing the company with $15.5 billion greater in-place revenue and $9 billion greater in-place net income as being LESS valuable than the other? Do you believe that Apple's future prospects mean it will be more profitable than Microsoft in the near future, or that Microsoft's profits will diminish below Apple's?

Bill Simmons is popular

The New York Times has a Media & Advertising columnist writing about Bill Simmons, probably because his "Book of Basketball" was #1 on the New York Times non-fiction Best Sellers list last week. One things he tried to do was get a discussion with readers, so I tried to create a new email address for FIWK readers (quick betting line: O/U 7.5 readers* not counting the four of us?) to contact us directly without having to add a comment.

But FIWK@gmail doesn't work because Gmail requires at least 6 characters and F*ckIfWeKnow doesn't work because Gmail doesn't allow special characters (*). Ideas? Do we even need a separate email address?

*I'm counting readers as people who have come directly to our site to see if we have put up a new post.