Apple Overtakes Microsoft in Market Value

[sw20]

Mkt values move around

But what stands out is SiliconValley has more $100Bn+ mkt value cos. HQd in region than any region in world; has most of the interesting start-ups like facebook, etc; and has most of world's leading VCs in offices on Sand Hill Rd....what the hell ever happened with stagnant Bos or Seattle or other alleged tech centers???

Smartest engineering kids generally are at Stanford and Berkeley (esp in the grad schools), far less so at IL and Carneg-Mell...and embarrassingly few of note from MIT (or Caltech) in recent decades; are there any other engineering schools of value?....no. of alums of past 25yrs who've amassed serious net worth for selves reveals more about caliber of colleges than anything else

And cos. have short half-lives for retaining talent....Microsoft was an '80s-'90s-era monopoly w/crappy software that made a lot of guys really rich; suspect most of smartest engineers retired many yrs ago...the stock has been dead for how long?

Google is the modern MSFT...a lucrative one-trick pony; smartest guys have largely retired or semi-retired

Apple is an interesting back-from-dead revival in tech; Steve's net worth is puny vs the MSFT or GOOG guys but suspect more engineers and financiers respect how many businesses he's been able to disrupt over past ~10yrs; Steve's advantage is he's not an engineer, so he thinks about products in terms of customer relevance and useability....Apple's % R&D spend is amusingly low vs one-trick ponies like MSFT or GOOG or puny dinosaurs like Dell...I'm more intrigued by the vast waste of shareholder dollars on useless R&D by profitable/cash-rich but intellectually stagnant, innovation-free cos.

Cos., technologies and personalities come and go and are by definition obsoleted by some next gen as smart, hungry engineers are created every year; question is where are latest, smartest kids choosing to attend college and to which cos. do they migrate post-grad...and which cos. are they starting...

 

[Artisan Fan]

Georgia Tech produces quite a few startup founders as well. MIT does a very good imho but they don't always get the publicity since they do many medical and pharma related firms. Silicon Valley has definitely figured it out though.

 

[Cary Grant]

With HTML5 on the way... I'd say Steve Jobs is smiling right now.

 

[GQgeek]

Originally Posted by sw20

Google is the modern MSFT...a lucrative one-trick pony;

I don't think either are one-trick ponies. Obviously, it's a little hard to top the success of windows and office, or Search/ads in google's case, but MS has lots of other really good products that are competitive in their markets against other very strong companies (Sony, Oracle, etc) and google, if this cloud **** takes off, is pretty well positioned to do well there.

 

[Jumbie]

I think there was a response by a Google exec to that one-trick pony thing. Roughly paraphrased it was along the lines of "If we're a one-trick pony it's a damned good trick!"