Jordan, that's not true. I'd only be starting with a base of $9 Billion if I owned ALL shares of MSFT. The total size of MSFT's market cap is only indirectly relevant to an investor, and its relevance is in how it can be leveraged (often illegally but that's another story) to increase growth. If even that kind of leverage cannot produce better results than 9% YOY (on MSFT's STRONGEST performer), I should expect to see a significantly lower P/E.
In fact, I start with a considerably smaller cash hoard when I buy $100 of MSFT shares than when I buy, say, $100 of AAPL shares.
By the way, both Jordan and Rocky, it's not particularly interesting to me as an investor that many other companies fared worse than the ones I invest in during the past few years. All that concerns me is the performance of my own investments. Whether or not MSFT (or AAPL) outperformed SUNW or CSCO isn't germane. However, I do care how a company's market share varies over time, and there, while AAPL is holding its own versus the lot of PC vendors, with enormous room for growth, MSFT is also holding pretty much steady vs. other OS vendors and Office suite vendors, but has almost no room to gain market share.
Dave |
