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Wall Street: Software More Valuable Than Oil

Posted by samzenpus on from the rich-in-ideas dept.

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.'"

6 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Umm... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Bizarre coinages aside, Wall Street wasn't making a comparative pronouncement on the value of software and oil(pro-tip: without oil, the market for shiny consumer goods would skew heavily toward the 'canned' variety...); but on the relative value of a company with substantial ability to pull margins that its peers cannot, vs. a company with a smaller ability to do that.

    Now, carry on. It's the "information age" or somesuch...

  2. ridiculous by JonySuede · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is ridiculous !

    Without oil we have no modern civilization. Even if you could somehow replace all the energy produce from oil, you will still need it for: pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, plastics and others various organics chemicals. The modern world depends on oil even more than it dose on software.

    --
    Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    1. Re:ridiculous by cfalcon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:ridiculous by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Informative

      Exxon doesn't advance anything.

      Silly little man.

      Things like Autotune exist because of companies like Exxon. You have no fucking clue how much Exxon alone has advanced ground radar and sonography, the amount of science Exxon has contributed is rather impressive. Because of oil companies, we know far more about our own planet than you can possibly imagine. These guys make a living out of generating high resolution maps of what the crust of our planet above AND BELOW the surface of the ocean are made of its not even funny.

      They don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, its about money, but they most certainly do advance science in numerous ways in order to further their own business, to find oil where they couldn't find it before, which directly benefits volcanologists and archeologists for instance. They've created technology that has allowed my county to turn away a potentially extremely profitable chemical processing plant ... because tech the another oil company developed let them see into the ground well enough to predict that any leakage would go directly into our water supply ... not just because of the whole NIMBY side, but because there was actual clear evidence that it would be a problem.

      Oil companies do a lot for you besides get you to where you want to go, don't be so ignorant about the world around you. I'm not telling you that you should love the oil companies because they are trying to save the world, thats simply not true. Saying they do nothing to advance anything however is 100% false in every way.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. The hyperbole is ridiculous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Apple's mind-miners explore myriad complexities to develop and understand new technologies."

    Apple isn't NASA in the 60's, it's a manufacturer of shiny gadgets. They don't even have a research division.

    Apple profits because people are vain, and are willing to accrue massive amounts of debt to buy pretty things.

  4. This is bad news by makubesu · · Score: 5, Funny

    what countries are we going to invade for software now?