Actually to really compare the weight the company had in its days it is more meaningful to compare its market cap to GDP.
Wolfram Alpha gives me 852 billion for 1967 so IBMs market cap was approx. 22.5% of that. 2012's estimated GPD is 15.6 trillion thus Apple has a mere 4.2% of that.
That was how big IBM really felt back then.
If we correct the error, we conclude that in 1967, IBM's market cap was approximately 3.3% of US GDP.
That seems much more reasonable to me. Although IBM owned much more of the market for computers than Apple does, the role of computers in society has expanded drastically. E.g., there was no consumer computer market at all in 1967.
P.S. MSFT’s 1999 high of $620.6 billion represented 6.5% of 1999's US GDP.
Thank you I was unaware. I thought it looked quite high but decided not to check. Your explanation also didn't occur to me I rationalized it away with their monopoly position but of course the IBM monopoly must have been worth less than the MSFT monopoly given the enormous expansion in market size.
I didn't downvote it, but the calculation appears wrong: the $852.7B are nominal 1967 GDP; in 2012 dollars, this would correspond to more than $4T, so IBM was less than 5% of GDP even back then.
