For a brief moment last night Marketwatch and many other financial-watching sites got very excited: Apple had passed Microsoft on the Standard & Poor 500 market ranking. That must mean that its market capitalisation - the share price times the issued share capital - had passed Microsoft, right? So should Steve Ballmer just shut the place up and give the money back to shareholders?
Unfortunately for those so excited, it turns out that S&P uses a slightly different measure from most to measure market cap.
