the reflexions insider

At around 2:30 this afternoon something significant happened: Apple’s market capitalization exceeded that of Microsoft. Apple is now valued as the second-biggest American company after ExxonMobil, and the biggest technology company in the world. This is a stunning event, as it was a decade ago that Apple was nearly written off, saved in part by a cash infusion from Microsoft itself. At that time Microsoft’s market cap was over half a trillion dollars bigger than Apple’s.

It’s clear that this marks a milestone in the long arc of computing history, where corporate IT spending has been overshadowed by consumer spending. And that’s directly the result of mobile.

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At times the internet feels like a giant shared electronic hallucination, as if willed by some absynthe-and-ether-fueled Victorian-era futurist (someone like, say, Jules Verne who arguably envisioned it in 1860). The internet is mind-numbingly enormous, and it’s fundamentally changed human communications. We’re fortunate to be witnesses to this.

Some of what makes the internet interesting is how it scales: servers, routers, data centers running on a shared set of protocols. But what tickles me the most isn’t the internet-as-infrastructure. It’s what rides atop the internet, above the layers of network cables, servers, and even above applications and RSS feeds; it’s about identity, and how it’s represented in a digital world.

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