In one of the clearest signs yet of the renaissance that’s finally putting a close to The Dark Age of Personal Computing, Apple Inc. (AAPL) has overtaken Microsoft (MSFT) to become the second-most-valuable U.S. company.

What’s the difference between a company’s stock market capitalization and the value of its actual business (which is referred to as “enterprise value”)?

Apple stock market capitalization

Microsoft stock market capitalization

A company’s stock market capitalization includes the net value of the cash and debt on the company’s books.  To figure out the imputed value of the company’s actual business, therefore, you have to adjust for the value of those other things.

Business facts aside, today marks a psychological triumph for Apple Computer fans that has been over 30 years in the making. Cheers to a company that has become the poster child of American success, and one that has done so while inspiring creativity in millions of designers, programmers, artists, and consumers alike.

Thinking different, while not grammatically or politically correct, can sometimes lead to a moment that can change the course of our lives forever.

What do you think? Have you bought into the whole Mac experience? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you are one of the millions that once could not live without your “second brain” a.k.a the Palm Pilot®, the memories of such days may well be reduced to just that, only memories.

With an inability to stave of defections to the now ubiquitous BlackBerry® manufactured by Canadian company RIMM, or the now ubiquitous replacement to that corporate staple, known as the iPhone®, Palm now finds itself in desperate times.

It is always a sad day to see an everyday icon go by the way side. But such is tech and its gadgets. Its fans are ever demanding more. More design, more function, more features and more price reductions. Technology companies have tried to play this game of catch up and stay ahead at the cost of their own corporate vision, and profitability.

With the advent of the game-changing iPhone, Apple has reinvented the way smart electronics are expected to operate. More importantly, they have created the new standard for the customer experience. How ironic, that a company that once was also the headline king capturing death nell countdowns of its near demise, has reinvented  not only itself, but entire media industries it dominates. Apple is now a top 5 company with a $200 billion market cap.

Palm, now with a huge inventory oversupply, a sales forecast cut in half and a roaring cash fire make Palm’s chances for survival slim.

Palm reported mixed fiscal third quarter results and troubling projections for the current quarter ending in May. Looking ahead, the company says sales will fall below $150-million (U.S.) in the quarter, which is more than 50% below the analyst target of $305 -million.

Analysts didn’t waste much time weighing in. Canaccord Adams cut Palm’s price target to $0 from $4, and Kaufman Brothers and Morgan Joseph cut Palm’s rating to sell.

Palm says it has $592-million in cash available, but executives didn’t provide a specific cash burn forecast for the current quarter or provide an answer to how many quarters it can continue to operate.

Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum estimates Palm’s fiscal fourth quarter cash burn will be about $148-million. If true, that will consume 25% of Palm’s cash, leaving the company with $444-million left to live on.

Assuming the quarterly cash burn moderates to a mere $100-million a quarter, Palm has about a year’s worth of cash left.

Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein, a former Apple VP, has been leading Palm with apparently with only one goal: beat his former employer at their own game. Unfortunately, the goal of a CEO is lead a company into profitability. Not to satisfy personal grudge matches.

Palm was embroiled with Apple recently in a technology fight in which, rather than invent their own iTunes®, Palm decided to manipulate the USB hardware identification routines to allow the Palm Pre to pretend to be an iPhone. This allowed The Palm Pre to acquire the same iTunes synchronization ease -of-use that the iPhone has. Apple would release a new update to iTunes that would beak this Palm “hack”. The two companies went back and forth with updates to their respective products to leapfrog the other. Eventually Palm was criticized by the international standards organization because of the improper use of the USB standards, and Palm relented.

Palm’s customers were the real losers unfortunately, because Palm should have created their own solution from the beginning.

Palm may have realized all too late that sometimes the best thing to do, is what you do best. Not what your competitor does best.

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

Does “I’m a Mac” mean “I’m less expensive to manage?” An Enterprise Desktop Alliance survey says Macs cost a lot less than PCs to manage — yet Macs come with special challenges for enterprise IT admins.

By Tom Kaneshige

Keep in mind that Enterprise Desktop Alliance is a group of software developers who’ve bandied together to deploy and manage Macs in the enterprise. The group surveyed 260 IT administrators in large U.S. companies with both Macs and PCs who are involved in some degree with IT cost calculations. Enterprise Desktop Alliance members include Centrify, Absolute Software, Group Logic, Web Help Desk, and most recently IBM.

[ Another Enterprise Desktop Alliance survey shows two out of three companies buying Macs this year, which will bring integration challenges for IT admins, CIO.com reports. ]

The survey found that Macs were cheaper in six of seven computer management categories: troubleshooting, help desk calls, system configuration, user training and supporting infrastructure (servers, networks and printer). Nearly half of the respondents cited software licensing fees as roughly the same for both platforms.

A whopping 65 percent of respondents said it costs less to troubleshoot Macs than PCs, 19 percent said they spent the same on both computers, and only 16 percent said they spent less to manage PCs than Macs.

Even more impressive, a majority of the respondents citing the low cost of Macs in nearly all categories said Macs were more than 20 percent cheaper to manage than PCs.

With Macs dominating in almost every cost category, why would 16 percent claim they spent less troubleshooting PCs? “It might be an [issue] of expertise of the IT staff,” says Tom Cromlin, spokesperson for the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. “They’re probably more comfortable troubleshooting PCs.”

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Jon Oltsik has another reason. He says top execs often prefer Macs, and thus supporting those machines take on more importance. “It’s not about managing [Mac] systems, which may be easier than Windows” on a machine-by-machines basis, Oltsik explains. “It’s when the CEO wants IT to install software on his or her Mac, which will need immediate attention and take time away from other tasks.”

The cost of management appears to be a key driver for Macs in the enterprise. Nearly half of respondents said they brought in Macs mainly because of their low total cost of ownership and ease of technical support.

In fact, many small companies with limited IT resources told CIO.com that they moved to Macs after getting fed up with costly PC support issues. “Mac owners tend to do a lot of problem resolution themselves by communicating with other users,” Oltsik says.

One of the flaws of the survey is that it doesn’t factor in the cost of the PC or Mac itself, only the costs associated with managing the computers. Macs, of course, cost more than most PCs. However, many companies told CIO.com that the low cost of managing Macs more than makes up the cost difference between the computers.

Many, but not all. “You can buy a PC for $400, while the cheapest Mac is over a thousand,” Jon Graff, director of IT operations at A&E, told CIO.com last year.. “In the real world, you’re spending a lot more on a Mac.”

While managing Macs may be cheaper than managing PCs, Macs pose their own special challenges as companies get up to speed supporting a Mac-PC environment.

According to another recent Enterprise Desktop Alliance survey, chief among those hurdles are: security and file sharing between operating systems, client management, backup and data recovery of Mac files, Active Directory integration, application compatibility, configuration consistency, cross-platform help desk and knowledge base support, and standard management utilities for both Macs and PCs.

Ben Hanes, senior systems administrator at Children’s Hospital of Oakland Research Institute, has been working through these issues for years. On the troubleshooting front, Hanes only recently adopted a help desk system that lets his team troubleshoot Macs remotely from a PC.

There also might be hidden costs when managing Macs, warns Oltsik. “In the past, you generally needed specialized tools to manage Macs,” he says. “If this is the case, then you will have redundant tasks and management systems. Another issue is skills, as you may need to hire or train a PC administrator on the Mac platform. A Mac administrator may cost more than a PC administrator.”

Tom Kaneshige is a senior writer for CIO.com in Silicon Valley. Send him an email at tkaneshige@cio.com. Or follow him on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.