Most of you remember the truly dark days a few years ago, when Apple was making some serious managerial missteps and market share continued to dwindle. Even as a couple of billion dollars' worth of red ink gushed from Cupertino like the torrent of blood pouring out of the elevator in The Shining, die-hard Mac fans continually tried to find reasons to counter the pressure to jump the sinking Apple ship and swim over to that ocean liner with all the Windows. One of the rationalizations we remember getting batted around at that time was that Apple wasn't in any real danger of sinking-- they still had a ton of cash in the bank, and-- this was the kicker-- Apple was still listed higher in the Fortune 500 than Microsoft was. Not only was that spurious reasoning, but it didn't remain true for very long; right now, for instance, Microsoft is at 137, while Apple lags at 223.

And yet, even though we never really liked bringing those kinds of rankings into the already irrational and muddled platform wars, we feel we just have to mention a financial ranking in which Apple actually beats Microsoft. MacCentral reports that Barron's, one of the big players in the business news world, has just compiled their own "top 500 company rankings." As opposed to Fortune's ranking methodology, which we believe only takes company revenues into account, Barron's approach combines revenues with total return and return on investment numbers, since today even "a company without any earnings can still have a rapidly rising stock price." So Barron's crunched all their numbers, and when the dust settled, Apple was actually ranked fifth. According to a CNET article, Microsoft grabbed fourteenth place, just ahead of Sun.

So there you have it; it all depends on just which numbers you're examining. Incidentally, Apple shouldn't feel too smug about their top-one-percent slot... If Steve Jobs has a white whale, we think it's got to be Dell, probably because of Michael Dell's infamous remarks about a year and a half ago. (For those with short memory spans, when asked what he'd do if he were running Apple, he replied that he'd shut it down and give the money back to the stockholders.) Ever since then, it's seemed like Apple's been comparing itself to Dell-- creating an online build-to-order store like Dell, beating Dell's inventory level, etc. Well, now Steve has something else to shoot for: Dell holds the number-two slot in the Barron's 500. How much do you want to bet Steve's scheming ways to beat them out in next year's list?