Interesting article in The Register quoting Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who says that on at least three separate occasions, the company was close to merging with Apple. Bet they wish they had now.
I also heard from a colleague today that if you take Apple's results out of the S&P 500, the index wouldn't have been positive last year. Has anyone else come across this piece of trivia?
As the commenter below pointed out, that doesn't make much sense. That's what happens when you just write down something that was screamed in your ear without thinking about it logically.
There is no way that is true.
The S&P 500 is a market-weighted index, and the total market cap is about $10 trillion. Apple's market cap is now about $70 billion, after its 2005 rocketship gains.
Even if Apple had gone from $30 billion to $90 billion in a year, this would be about half a percentage point gain for the S&P. The S&P gained 4.9% in 2005.
Posted by: Ben | January 12, 2006 at 06:40 PM
Were they referring to the NASDAQ, which was only up 1.9% and is a smaller index?
Although Google helped the NASDAQ quite a bit too.
Posted by: Mister Juggles | January 13, 2006 at 01:08 AM