High-Tech Companies and Stock Performance

It's becoming very common to speak wonders of a company because of its short-term stock performance.  If you are looking for a quick buck, the approach might be right.  However, if you want to understand longer term viability for the business, you need to look at trends.  Below is a figure with selected companies - the ones involved in the fight for your attention and your tech spending - and their stock performance for the last 10, 5 and 1 year - and 2012 year to date performance:

Some quite interesting trends can be quickly spotted using the stock performance in colors and relative sizes:

• 10 years: Apple is the big winner, and Microsoft the biggest loser.  This appears to support the boom in consumer electronics (fueled 10 years ago by the iPod) and Microsoft's stagnation after its antitrust suit.
• 5 years: Same as 10 years, Apple with largest returns and Yahoo! falling by over 50%.  This confirms the demise of the portal business as a viable content aggregation venue.  Microsoft shows a 1% performance, barely in positive ground.
• 1 year: Apple still on top, fueled by its iOS triad (iPhone, iPad, iPod), and worst in class is still Yahoo!, this time followed by Google, so far showing many doubts in its Android strategy to compete against Apple's products.
• Year-to-Date: Apple remains on top, while Google is the worst in class.  While the post-Steve-Jobs Apple has managed to snatch the role as most valuable company in the world, Larry Page's Google is flat in search growth (and still very much a one-trick-pony, largely dependent on advertising as a source of revenue) and still muddling through its tablet and smartphone strategy.

The future holds interesting things for this uneven bunch ... and who comes out on top remains to be seen.