Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World

Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by nasmorn on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @02:11AM (#4411376)

Actually to really compare the weight the company had in its days it is more meaningful to compare its market cap to GDP. Wolfram Alpha gives me 852 billion for 1967 so IBMs market cap was approx. 22.5% of that. 2012's estimated GPD is 15.6 trillion thus Apple has a mere 4.2% of that. That was how big IBM really felt back then.

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by hollerith on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @09:32AM (#4412587)

There was a huge error in the OP as explained in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411478.

If we correct the error, we conclude that in 1967, IBM's market cap was approximately 3.3% of US GDP.

That seems much more reasonable to me. Although IBM owned much more of the market for computers than Apple does, the role of computers in society has expanded drastically. E.g., there was no consumer computer market at all in 1967.

P.S. MSFT’s 1999 high of $620.6 billion represented 6.5% of 1999's US GDP.

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by nasmorn on Wednesday August 22, 2012 @08:28AM (#4417011)

Thank you I was unaware. I thought it looked quite high but decided not to check. Your explanation also didn't occur to me I rationalized it away with their monopoly position but of course the IBM monopoly must have been worth less than the MSFT monopoly given the enormous expansion in market size.

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by lostlogin on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @03:56AM (#4411622)

That's a great metric. Was trying to measure The East India Company by this metric, but it's surprisingly hard to do so.

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by hollerith on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @03:09AM (#4411507)

Am curious why someone downvoted this.

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by microtherion on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @12:07PM (#4413315)

I didn't downvote it, but the calculation appears wrong: the $852.7B are nominal 1967 GDP; in 2012 dollars, this would correspond to more than $4T, so IBM was less than 5% of GDP even back then.

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by huxley on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @09:36AM (#4412598)

It's because the linked article double counted inflation: "IBM’s 1967 market cap was not $1.3 trillion in real dollars, it was $192.3 billion"

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Re:Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of ... by hollerith on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @10:16AM (#4412775)

Then why not downvote the dozens of other comments that missed the double count?

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