Hot on the heels of Apple passing Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable business in the world, there's another shakeup at a slightly lower level. IBM is the second-largest tech company by market cap last week, behind Apple and just a hair ahead of Microsoft. It's the first time in 15 years that Big Blue looks larger than Redmond.
Around the turn of the millennium, Microsoft's market cap was three times the size of IBM's, topping out at $600 billion during the peak of Microsoft's powers. That was also the pinnacle of the dot-com bubble. As you might imagine, things have changed since then.
A picture says a lot
To get a sense of how your favorite tech titans of today arrived where they are today, I've pulled up some market cap data from Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor. These charts will look similar, but not identical, to the share price charts you can pull up on Yahoo Finance. The differences between the two chart styles stem mostly from the company issuing or buying back shares, which affect the stock price but not the total value of all available shares. Feast your eyes on this: