Google Inc. has surpassed Microsoft Corp. to become the world’s second-largest technology company, in another sign of the expanding ability of the Internet to facilitate computing tasks once completed on desktop machines.
Google, operator of the most popular search engine, rose 0.8 percent to $760.66 at 10:30 a.m. in New York, for a market capitalization of about $249.5 billion. Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, fell 0.6 percent to $29.57, about a $247.8 billion valuation.
The triumph over Microsoft follows Google’s rise from a search-engine invented by two Stanford University students into an advertising powerhouse that makes the world’s most popular mobile-software. It also reflects rise of cloud computing — where programs are stored remotely and accessed over the Internet — as consumers shift more tasks to smartphones and tablets that they once completed on personal computers.
“The PC hardware business is obviously struggling,” said Martin Pyykkonen, a Greenwood Village, Colorado-based analyst at Wedge Partners Corp. “The transition here is pretty straightforward in terms of where things have moved to and certainly that’s cloud, that’s Web.”
Only Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable company at $632.7 billion, tops Google among technology companies. Apple passed Microsoft in 2010 on rising sales of iPhones and iPads — devices that helped usher in a new era of computing that’s less reliant on PCs.
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