It depends on your perspective. If you're one of Microsoft's shareholders (the perspective the WSJ may be writing for), market capitalization is not directly re

It depends on your perspective. If you're one of Microsoft's shareholders (the perspective the WSJ may be writing for), market capitalization is not directly relevant. If Jane owns 100 shares of ABCD that most recently traded at $10 apiece, and then the issuer issues 1,000 new shares to its employees but the shares continue to trade at the same price, the market capitalization has increased but Jane's stake hasn't changed in value. Shareholders do care about price return and dividends. They might also care about total return, subject to some reinvestment strategy and tax regime. Market cap is also problematic because it can't be calculated in real time. Reporting companies generally only publish a share count once a quarter. They publish two numbers: the gross count of shares outstanding on a particular day (which doesn't count in-the-money options and other live claims on a company's equity) and the fully-diluted share count averaged over the quarter (without publishing the strike price distribution of the options). Neither one is exactly what you'd need to calculate an implied whole-company market valuation anyway, so in general any attempt to measure market cap is necessarily going to get an uncertain, out-of-date, imperfect metric. (A useful one, don't get me wrong! But not what principally matters to the shareholders.)