[fab1an]

I don't know nearly enough about macroeconomic trends or basics to have an informed opinion on this, but I do wonder how much of the software giant's cash-generating power is eventually still based on industries that 'extract stuff out of the planet'. Even if that dependency were indirect - say by the amount of oil/minerals/diamonds needed to produce a chip that your software needs to run on - such a dependency would still mean that software can never be as much of a 'primal' industry as oil is/was.

[adventured]

It's an interesting consideration. Software is clearly not a primary layer, but neither is oil.

Energy, land, machinery, labor, transport - a few of the things you need to extract and then process oil. The same goes for creating and making a microchip useful. The first oil tower at Titusville didn't use oil as its energy source.

Is oil a layer two product, and software a layer three product? Perhaps, however oil is definitely not primal, it just seems like it is. The vast effort and industry required to make oil useful, along with a century of science, is mostly hidden away from view.