chapter 06DATA, THE NEW OIL? Technologies Enabling In the first decade of the 20th Century, Standard Oil was the largest and most valuable New Business Models company in the most booming sector of the industrial revolution. In 1906 it controlled 91% of the oil production of the United States. The concentration of power in that market caused the Supreme Court of that country to order Standard Oil to divide into 34 different companies. Even so, one of these resulting companies, Standard Oil of New Jersey (which would later become Exxon), was one of the first companies in the world to achieve a market capitalization of more than 1 billion dollars in 1925. A titan. Throughout the 20th Century, ExxonMobil and other oil companies were always present in the indexes of the most valuable stocks in the world, accompanied by companies from other sectors that oil contributed to develop: energy, automotive and chemical. Throughout the century, technological companies were also incorporated into the indexes, starting with General Electric and AT&T, which built the world’s nervous system: lines for transporting electricity and communications. In the 1970s and 80s, the first giants of information technology were added, such as IBM, Xerox and Hewl- ett-Packard, which created the first machines to convert electricity into bits and bytes, and protocols to transport them from one place to another through telephone lines. A TWO-WAY PATH 67