Apple pips Microsoft to techie league’s top spot
THEY have been rivals for years but now Apple has got one over on Microsoft after becoming the world’s biggest tech company based on market value. Shares in the company, which makes the iPhone, have pushed its market value to £153billion, above Microsoft’s £151billion.
Apple iPod Touch Pocket Computer
Apple shares are worth more than ten times what they were a decade ago after churning out hit product after hit product such as the iPod, iPhone and MacBook laptops. That trend looks set to continue as today sees the launch in Britain of Apple’s iPad tablet computer, a format Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates mooted in 2001 but was shot down. And next month Apple boss Steve Jobs will unveil the next generation iPhone – the device that Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer dismissed back in 2007 as having ‘no chance’. Microsoft, whose operating systems run on 90 per cent of the world’s personal computers, has not been able to match growth rates from the 1990s.
Its stock is down 20 per cent from ten years ago. Apple, which struggled By Joel Taylor to get its products into the mainstream, resorted to a £103million investment from Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft has suffered because the consumer market, Apple’s focus, has outpaced the growth of spending on technology by businesses, Microsoft’s stronghold, said David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor. ‘Apple has had the wind at its back,’ he added. ‘Microsoft is playing catch-up.’ Article First Published in Metro — By Joel Taylor