“We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft needs to lose.”

— Apple CEO Steve Jobs, August 1997

And there it is. Today Apple, not Microsoft is the world’s most valuable technology company.

As I write this Apple (AAPL) shares are trading at $244.87, giving it a market capitalization of $223.1 billion. Meanwhile, shares of Microsoft (MSFT) are trading at $24.79 and the company’s market cap sits at $217.78 billion (see table below; click to enlarge).

And so Cupertino has finally surpassed Redmond in total value. The only American company with a market cap greater than Apple is Exxon Mobil (XOM).

UPDATE: Apple closed the day well ahead of Microsoft. Its market cap: $222.07 billion; Microsoft’s: $219.18 billion.

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• Dueling Market Caps: Apple and Microsoft

ComScore data on the search market are widely considered the industry standard and therefore more closely watched by Wall Street. Still, the big picture is clear: Google is not the competition, it’s the environment in which you compete. The IT industry used to say that about IBM (IBM), but today, the adage seems equally applicable to Google, which dominates the search market just as IBM once dominated the computer industry.

“This is forming to be a perfect storm for the venture capital industry that may result in a significant contraction of firms and capital,” explained Steve Carnevale of Point Cyprus Ventures, who believes institutional investors will eventually put less money into venture capital. “This storm has two fronts. The U.S. economy and the long investment cycle associated with life sciences and clean tech. First, the economy as a whole. The U.S. is bankrupt as a country as a result of massive borrowing that has grown over 30 years. This borrowing created an inflated investment portfolio that made available capital to tertiary alternative investments like venture capital. We are at the beginning of a massive de-leveraging that has unprecedented consequences for the economy and the venture capital industry. … The industry will contract not only because of overall economic weakness, but because the fundamental investment cycle will be dramatically longer. … Now the majority of venture capital is going into life sciences and increasingly clean tech. These types of investments will take longer to produce returns then in the traditional VC investments in the computer industry. When institutional investors figure that out, they will reduce their capital availability for this kind of alternative asset. … Therefore, the VC industry will get sandwiched between the economy and it own fundamentals.”

Ugly times for venture capital. That said, as Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often notes, the best time to invest is often “when people are cowering under their desks.” ‘Course it was Sequoia that just held that “RIP: Good Times” meeting last week. …

[Image credit: Sad Guys on Trading Floors]