Google Passes Microsoft’s Market Value as PC Loses to Web

I think Google has a kind of purpose and drive which will take it very very far.<p>They want to "organize the world's information", but that's less than half the story - an even bigger challenge is making all this information not only understandable and usable to humans but making it all work seamlessly together - a monumental task they are barely getting started at.<p>Unrelated (but necessary) they also seem to be doing very well at the organizational aspect of absorbing new ideas and companies and integrating them into themselves.

Alternative headline: Google passes Microsoft's market value as Microsoft gives gobs of cash to shareholders rather than hold onto it to inflate market value.<p>Still, it's a significant thing I suppose. But we tend to ignore the cash position of companies in stories like this. If Google suddenly paid out 100 billion to shareholders tomorrow then it's market value would rightly drop by about 100 billion, but that wouldn't mean Microsoft was suddenly winning again.

Funny APPL has a market cap (624B) that is bigger than Google (248) and "wintel" (248 + 115 = 363) <i>combined</i>.<p>Seriously, that Google has lapped the larger part of what was the Microsoft / Intel juggernaut of the last century is notable of course, but I wonder if its the wrong question.

They haven't quite done it on a dividend-adjusted basis yet though.

Weak signal given the size of the companies and their volatilities.<p>Let's observe the quoted, albeit stale, Google market capitalisation of $249.2 billion with a current vega-weighted mean implied volatility (market's opinion of what Google's volatility will be) of 31.12% and the quoted Microsoft market cap of $248.7 billion with an IV index of 22.51%. The question is, assuming these two Gaussian random variables vary independently [1], what is the probability that GOOG is still bigger than MSFT in one year? The answer is a <i>hair</i> above 50%. Plugging in $249.65 billion for Google and $248.02 billion for Microsoft (closer to present values) this probability rises closer to 51%.<p>Conclusion: insufficient evidence that this is more than random market jittering just yet.<p>[1] If this were more than a quick, stylised analysis I'd construct a covariance matrix or copula to describe the dependency structure. Given the razor thin odds, however, it is unlikely that correlation will help the OP's case too much.

Yet another "market value defines losing/winning" article between 2 products that don't even compete.

It's funny to call it "PC loses to Web" when MS doesn't actually make the PC but the software that <i>runs</i> on the PC. Whether you use Google or Microsoft, you are using a "PC" in the terms of the article. One might say that it is more about a three way contest where MS is losing mainly to Apple, depressing their price down lower than Google, and Google is going up for other reasons.<p>To the extent it is about Google, this is really about commoditization of software : Google is commodotizing the whole OS into the (free) browser. They are commodotizing office software into free Google Apps. They are showing that if you do it at scale and over the web you can operate at such efficiency that you basically give people all this stuff Microsoft charges for and still make huge amounts of money from the advertising revenue, or you can have pay model where the costs are an order of magnitude less than what MS needs to survive in its current form.

1) PC stands for Personal Computer. It is not synonymous with Microsoft or Windows. Personal Computer.<p>2) The web is useless with out Personal Computers or personal computing devices such as smart phones so the web hasn't lost to the PC and the PC hasn't lost to the web, they need each other.

Google's long time dream of becoming a bigger company than Microsoft is becoming real.

That's something of a non sequitur, I would think.

I guess search is a business after all :)

PC loses to Web <i>ads</i> is more likely.<p>I think Google's got better at getting people to click on ads. For example, one of the following is a search result and the other is an ad. How many people can differentiate between them on various monitors?<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png</a><p>I remember the time when Google differentiated itself by clearly marking ads, now it's no longer true for high value keywords.