A few years ago, Marc Andreessen first declared that “software is eating the world.” We have been mostly inclined to intuitively believe the trend he was referring to, but we were missing undisputable proof. Now we have quantified proof, at least for the domination of the technology as a whole if not specifically for software.
On Friday, I looked at the top 5 quarter-end market caps for the first quarter of 2017. All five are technology companies. I went back 11 years to the same day and saw that on March 31, 2006, only one out of the top 5 market caps, namely Microsoft, was a technology company. The top market caps were rather diversified, including financial services, industrial groups, technology, and of course oil production giants.
The sixth market cap on Friday was ExxonMobil, with $347 billion, which is 15 percent less than Facebook, ranked fifth. This quarter-end day quotation was not exceptional; this ranking seems to be stable and solid.
So what happened in the last decade at the top of the market cap list? When we look closer (see the graph below), we…