Google has apparently surpassed Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Rolfe Winkler writes in a MoneyBeat report for the Wall Street Journal that Google’s enterprise value finally overtook that of its fruity rival last week, attaining a value of $241 billion compared to the latter’s $233 billion.

“The search giant eclipsed the iPhone maker last week, actually. Few would have noticed because the metric by which Google jumped ahead isn’t the widely-watched one of market capitalization. Here Apple is still well ahead, with a market cap of $378 billion versus Google’s $286 billion.”

Winkler puts the anomaly down to Apple’s vast cash reserves, and offers the following scenario to help us understand the companies’ true worth. He says that if you purchased a home for $378,000 but found $145,000 in cash in the living room, you effectively only paid $233,000 for it. That’s what would happen if you were to buy Apple as well – it would cost $378 billion, but you’d be buying its $145 billion fortune as well.

“Strip out Apple’s $145 billion of net cash as of March, and Google’s $45 billion. This leaves an enterprise value of $233 billion for Apple, but $241 billion for Google, reflecting the underlying value of the companies’ actual operations.”

According to ZDNet’s Tom Foremski, Apple’s fall from grace is a direct result of investor’s slowly ebbing confidence in its ability to make money compared to Google. He points out that while Google is basically unchallenged in its main markets (Ads, web search, mobile etc), Apple faces serious competition to sell its hardware.

Because of this, Foremski questions Google’s policy of trying to copy Apple’s business model by pushing into hardware so aggressively, developing products like Google Glass, buying up Motorola for $12.5 billion, and marketing various mobile devices and Chromebooks. Foremski argues that Google is taking a big risk in pursuing this strategy, as it’s unlikely to be as profitable as its media and advertising businesses, and could therefore make the company less attractive to investors in the long run.

Foremski is right in saying that hardware is a more volatile business, but he completely misses the point that this is just a small part of Google’s wider strategy.

Obviously Google couldn’t have become the most valuable company in the world just by sticking to its traditional business model – the only way it can get any richer is by growing the internet itself, and for that to happen it needs to encourage more people to use more devices. In other words, Google’s push into hardware with new products like Glass is just one way of helping to foster that growth. What with its total domination of search and various other internet services, by developing new products that encourage us to spend more of our time online, all Google is doing is making sure that we spend more time clicking on its ads.