Suddenly, Amazon is Number Two (Premium)

Amazon.com this week surpassed Google parent company Alphabet to become the world's second-largest corporation by market capitalization. And it has its sights on Apple, which is currently the world's largest and most successful company.

I'd like to consider what this means, solely within the context of personal technology.

No, Amazon is not by any means a "pure" technology company: It is most widely known for its online retail store, of course. But then Alphabet/Google isn't arguably a "pure" technology company either, in that it makes over 90 percent of its revenues from advertising.

No matter: The success of these companies allows them to fund personal technology products and services that might not otherwise exist. And in doing so, they are having a dramatic impact on our daily lives, and purely from a personal technology perspective.

First, the numbers.

Market capitalization is kind of a bullshit measurement because it relies so heavily on stock price, which I consider to be too volatile, especially for tech stocks, and overly-reliant on market black magic. But I'm not a financial expert, so let's not worry about that right now. Market capitalization is a figure that represents the "value" of a company. And as any Google search will tell you, it is calculated by multiplying the total number of a company's shares by its current share price.

Apple, the world's largest company, has a market cap of roughly $890 billion at the time of this writing. One of the big financial stories of 2017 was the expectation that Apple would be the first corporation to surpass a $1 trillion market cap sometime in 2018. But the disastrous iPhone X launch scuttled that notion somewhat, with analysts noting that Apple has now twice reduced component orders for the device. And the market has responded by halting Apple's previous stock growth trajectory. (Looking at the stock today, it seems like Apple has actually rebounded in recent weeks, and after a February nosedive. Again, not a financial analyst.)

Amazon, meanwhile, just surpassed Alphabet/Google, with a market cap of $768 million, and its stock has been rocketing upward for the past year, with no interruptions at all. Alphabet/Google, with a more volatile and Apple-like stock price performance over the same time period, is settled in at $762 billion. The expectation is that Amazon will basically increase its lead over Alphabet/Google. And the conjecture, now, isn't when Apple hits $1 trillion. It's whether Amazon does it first.

Microsoft, by the way, is world's fourth-largest company, with a market cap of $717 billion. Interestingly, its stock price growth over the past year is much more like Amazon's than it is like Apple's or Google's, meaning that it has experienced a near-uninterrupted upward trajectory over the past year. (There was a hiccup in February, at the same time that Apple experienced its biggest stock price dive in this time period.)

That Microsoft doesn't factor...