Google has surpassed Microsoft's market valuation to become the world’s second-largest technology company.
This morning at 11:13 AM in New York, Google's share prices enjoyed a 0.7 percent increase to $759.98, resulting in a market capitalization of around $249.2 billion. The search engine giant's previous record was $747.24. Microsoft, however, saw its shares fall 0.3 percent to $29.67, representing a $248.7 billion valuation.
To put this in some perspective, Google was $19 billion behind Microsoft in market capitalization during the opening stages of 2012. If you look back two years ago, the latter was the world’s most valuable technology company, but was beaten by Apple due to the hype of the iPhone 5. The iOS developer's own market valuation, meanwhile, is a staggering $632.9 billion.
“The PC hardware business is obviously struggling,” said Martin Pyykkonen, a Wedge Partners analyst to Businessweek. “The transition here is pretty straightforward in terms of where things have moved to and certainly that’s cloud, that’s Web.”
