NASDAQ:AAPL – Apple Outranks Microsoft in S&P 500

NASDAQ:AAPL – Apple Outranks Microsoft in S&P 500

Apple is now ranked as the #2 constituent in the S&P 500 top 10 constituents, rated by market capitalization [resource: Standard & Poors]

The news surrounding Apple’s earnings report, and their stock price, had quite a week last week. On Tuesday, April 20th, Apple reported earnings that surpassed analysts expectations by over 36% (profits’ forecast). Apple reported generating over a 90% increase in revenue and sold over 9 million iPhones during the quarter.

There record numbers have resulted in a record profit of $3.07 billion for the second quarter of the 2010 financial year that ended March 27. This is an increase of 89.5 percent compared to the same period last year, coming on the back of sales of 8.75 million iPhones and nearly 3 million computers.

This news was apparently enough to push Apple up and over Microsoft on the Standard & Poors 500 rankings of market capitalization. This allowed Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) to become the second company on the S&P500, outranked only by the oil and gas company ExxonMobile.

According to the Moscow Times, Microsoft representatives are convinced that comparing capitalization using the S & P 500 index is wrong because it takes into account only the shares actually participating in the auction, and does not consider the shares owned by large shareholders and inaccessible to ordinary investors. Taking into account all shares, Microsoft is still ahead of Apple. On Friday, they were worth $271.3 billion and $246.4 billion, respectively.

I think that once again, this response from Microsoft shows the arrogance in the leadership of Microsoft. The position of, we can never be seen as second best to anyone. This is the same disposition that Microsoft has taken toward search engine Giant Google.

Oh well, if Microsoft would actually invest in technology and build products that people actually liked, and wanted, and weren’t completely frustrated over using – meaning, a product that just worked – then Microsoft wouldn’t find itself in these types of problems.