Word: microsoft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NASDAQ's close last Monday, the San Jose, Calif., Internet router maker emerged as the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of $555 billion, more than $13 billion ahead of the reigning cap king, Microsoft. This shifting of the tech-tonic plates represents more than just Cisco's success and uncertainty over Microsoft's legal problems. In fact, it provides a pretty good road map of the post-PC landscape into which our economy and volatile stock market are heading...
Previous turnovers of the market-cap champs, such as 1998's passing of the belt from General Electric to Microsoft, were useful indicators. Microsoft's emergence bespoke information technology as the driving force in our economy, supplanting consumer goods, aerospace and financial services as the sectors that investors most expected to outperform the rest of the market. The same point could have been made in 1993, when GE surpassed Exxon (consumer goods trumped oil), or a hundred years ago, when John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a monopolistic market bully and trust-busting wasn't even a slogan...
That's because stock prices are based in large part on expectations. The emergence of a new leader or leading sector reveals not necessarily which companies have been more profitable--even today General Motors makes more money than Microsoft--but which are likely to have gaudy earnings in the future. That's why technology, Internet and biotech stocks--the new economy--have been soaring the past few months. But that's also why last week, when investors felt that expectations had got out of hand in the face of higher interest rates, the new-economy stocks sold off heavily, Cisco...
Cisco finished the week behind Microsoft--the difference between them was about $2.40 on Cisco's share price--and no one knows what last Saturday night's breakdown of settlement talks will do to Microsoft's stock. But none of this alters a fundamental transformation as we move from a computer-based economy to a communications-based economy--one in which you don't need PC power at your fingertips anymore because you can reach it instantly via the Web. "Many years ago people had trouble understanding what drove political issues," says Cisco CEO John Chambers. "It was the economy...
Cisco's rise signifies a new phase of the technological revolution. Microsoft ruled the first phase, marked by decreasing microprocessor costs and cheaper data storage, which made the PC a household appliance. That confluence of technologies resulted in cell phones, game platforms, pagers and a host of other smart devices that are now in place...