Wall Street: Software More Valuable Than Oil

CWmike writes "The tech industry's answer to this week's stock market roller coaster was delivered on Tuesday by the mighty Apple Inc. Apple saw its stock price rise enough — gaining more than 5% — to briefly surpass Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company in the U.S., according to an AP analysis of its market cap. (Exxon Mobile wound up the day slightly ahead of Apple.) Most of the other major tech companies — including Intel, IBM, Dell, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard — all finished in positive territory yesterday, as markets made up ground lost in the big sell-off on Monday that also hit oil prices and other commodities.Tuesday's rally may be all that's needed to shake away, at least temporarily, some of the economic concerns the IT industry still faces. By closing in on Exxon, Apple effectively affirmed that there are few limits to tech growth. CW blogger Jonny Evans posits that ideas are why Apple beats Exxon on market cap, noting, 'While Exxon drills, hammers and crushes its way to find its billions, Apple's mind-miners explore myriad complexities to develop and understand new technologies.'"

Comments

Re:ridiculous

[cfalcon]

Actually, if you could replace all the energy you get from oil, you could use that energy to make the items you list out of simpler substances- no one has any problem combining ingredients to create oil and gas, the issue is that it's never efficient to do so compared to getting it out of the ground. But if we were given a magical device with 100x the energy of all our current sources, we could just afford to fabricate oil and whatever the end products are from veggies and such.