With the news that the value of Apple Inc’s shares are now more than £375 billion ($600 billion) and Facebook shelling out a billion dollars for a company which was worth half of that amount last week- it seems to be a pertinent question.
Indeed Apple Inc’s share price is up almost 60% since the start of the year and 90% over the past twelve months.
By contrast Microsoft is now worth £162 billion ($260 billion) and in 1999- at the peak of the dotcom boom, reached £386 billion ($619 billion) in market capitalisation.
On Monday, Facebook said it will pay £625 million to buy Instagram- an Apple App winning photo sharing smartphone app, which has only 13 employees and was launched in October 2010.
Could it be that this time round most companies and investors are concentrating on good old fashioned sales, money and profits?
Whether that makes the current market any more sustainable only time will tell- but a glance at the share price graph, courtesy of the Financial Times looks very spike like to me.