Apple Deposes Microsoft to Become World's Biggest Tech Company

From DailyTech: Apple has at least brief briefly become the world's largest tech company in terms of market cap. That spot has been held for over a decade by Microsoft, makers of the Windows operating system.

In trading Monday, Apple Inc.'s shares slipped $1.11 to close at $244.11, making its market cap about $222 billion. Microsoft's shares dipped even more, falling to $1.06, or 4.1 percent, to close at $25.01, for market cap of about $219 billion. Market cap is the dollar value of a company's outstanding shares, and is commonly used to compare companies in terms of size.

While yesterday's figures may not indicate that Apple has truly passed Microsoft to become the world's largest tech firm, they do indicate that it is on the verge of doing so. And that revelation alone is somewhat amazing, considering the veteran brand was on the verge of bankruptcy when Steven P. Jobs returned to the company in 1997 to serve as CEO.

Some commenters raised some excellent points about the nature of this victory for Apple, which were worth appending here. First, as some point out, market cap is only one indication of size. A better indicator perhaps is net operating income, which is a measure of a firm's profitability that excludes interest and income tax expenses. Microsoft currently has almost twice ($20.363B USD) the net operating income of Apple ($11.74B USD).

IBM also has more operating income. IBM ($17.012B USD) also has more operating income the Apple. Google ($8.312B USD) and HP ($10.136B USD) both come close to Apple's operating income as well.

However, the picture is slightly more complex than that. As mentioned, Apple holds virtual monopolies in four key markets. HP arguably does not hold enough marketshare to constitute a monopoly, despite making massive earnings in the PC sector. Google (internet search, internet advertising) and IBM (servers, supercomputing) both do hold virtual monopolies in a couple of critical sectors. And Microsoft obviously holds numerous effective monopolies (operating system, browser software, office software).

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