Shut down Dell and give the money back to shareholders
Almost everyone is opinionated about Apple and so is Michael Dell around 10 years back at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97, he was asked what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple Computer. To the dismay of thousands of IT executives he answered “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Things have changed quite a lot since October 1997 as Apple now has the iPod, iPhone, Mac OS X to name a few. Here are a few interesting facts.
A month later Steve Jobs responded “We’re coming after you, you’re in our sights.”
In January 2006 Apple passed Dell in market value, $72,132,428,843 vs. $71,970,702,760 respectively.
In Friday’s intraday NASDAQ trading, Apple’s market value passed 2 times that of Dell’s, $127.81 billion vs. $63.65 billion.
Surely Steve Jobs has had the last laugh, what say Mikey.
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For christ's sake do me a favour.
Market value/cap is pointless. Vodafone is the world's biggest mobile telephone company with like 200 million customers in 30 countries. It owns other huge companies in 20 other countries (including nearly 50% of Verizon). It is worth around £80 billion ($162 billion) according to the London Stock Exchange.
Yet last month it's value dropped by over £5 billion in a matter of minutes. Yes, over FIVE THOUSAND MILLIONS OF POUNDS. Why? Because there was a rumour - yes, rumour - that they had lost out on the contract for the iPhone in the UK. Wow, how will they survive?
If you ever needed proof that share prices and market cap are useless, temporary and bear no relation to the actual value of a company (i.e. its assets, earnings, products, customer base etc) then there it is.
And note how Apple's market cap shot up a few billion dollars on selling crappy iPhones to about 0.1% of the US population.......