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Big Blue Passes Redmond in Market Capitalization

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the latest Millward Brown brand value rankings. I'd lost track of the metric and was surprised to find that IBM had surpassed Microsoft in brand value last year.

Now IBM, which Microsoft so famously left in the dust in several ways on the strength of its PC offerings, has retaken Microsoft on a more widely watched measure.

According to the Business Insider blog, IBM surpassed Microsoft's market capitalization around 11 a.m. on Friday and held onto about a $1 billion lead at the close (IBM $207 billion, Microsoft $206 billion.)

The post's author and former Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff notes that Lou Gerstner was brought in from the outside to turn IBM and around, and asks rhetorically, "So how much longer will Microsoft stick with Steve Ballmer before it has to make the same move?"

The anti-Ballmer drumbeat is only getting louder.

Posted by Scott Bekker on May 23, 2011


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