Microsoft now the 3rd largest tech company behind Apple and IBM

[Student26]

Bloomberg have reported that IBM’s value yesterday reached $214 billion while Microsoft’s fell slightly to $213.2 billion. IBM has been steadily gaining on Microsoft in the last year by adding 22% to its overall value, while Microsoft’s value has seen a drop of 8.8% in the same period.

This isn’t at all surprising given the drive towards the cloud now for all technology companies and the servers required to get their presences there being supplied predominantly by only a few major firms, of which IBM has always been a leader. We could probably see Fujitsu, HP and others significantly climb in value too in the next couple of years, again off the back of the move to the cloud.

Microsoft’s business focuses predominantly on Windows, Windows Server and Office with other aspects of the company’s products, namely their Bing search engine and their Xbox gaming division being propped up by revenue from the company’s traditionally strong products. With very few exceptions Microsoft have never made hardware and certainly haven’t got into the server market.

This is the first time that IBM has topped Microsoft in value since 1996 and is now the fourth-largest company in the world by market value. IBM sold their own PC division to a Chinese company in 2005 and HP also now look set to sell their own PC division to concentrate on the prospering server market. . .

Microsoft are still the world’s largest software company but in 2000 were worth three times the value of IBM. This shows just how much IBM’s business has grown in that time, and the company has announced plans to grow their business even further by 2015. Back in the summer of 2000, Microsoft was valued at $430 billion but dropped to $135 billion in 2009 at the height of the economic downturn.

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[Bearcat]

Thanks for the news Student. Microsoft is still a real "cash gusher" of a corporation, so its hard to feel real bad for them.

[safeguy]

As the say, competition is healthy.