VentureBeat has a post up about the stock-market value of Google’s shares, and how it briefly eclipsed that of Cisco — Silicon Valley’s biggest and traditionally most highly valued company. Of course, earlier this year Cisco was worth substantially more, and could be again. But it’s still fun to play the market-capitalization game. So Google is at $160-billion (give or take a hundred million or so). That’s a lot, right? Not really.
In fact, the company isn’t even in the top 20 most highly-valued companies in North America — not even on the front page of the leaderboard, as a golfer would say. According to Yahoo’s stock screener tool (Google either doesn’t have one or I couldn’t find it), Google is still well behind Exxon Mobil ($461-billion), GE ($378-billion) and Citigroup ($260-billion). It’s still almost 50 per cent smaller than Microsoft ($283-billion) and is considerably smaller than Wal-Mart ($204-billion). However, it is well ahead of IBM ($151-billion), Intel ($123-billion) and Hewlett-Packard ($121-billion). Not bad for only having been a public company for about two years, I guess.