Apple Stock and Google Stock Are More Valuable Than Ever! Is an investment going to be a good recommendation?

Apple and Google are the two most valuable brands in the world according to the latest news from CNN. As an investor this is good news for anyone who bought stock in these companies months ago, especially Apple which just two years ago was trading for under 100 dollars a share! Now that the stock of Apple has reflected the explosive growth of the brand new tablet market with the iPad and iPad2, Apple has taken over the mantle of most valuable brand from Google! Does this mean it's too late to invest in Apple? Is Google on the decline?

It wasn't long ago that Google experienced a meteoric rise to dominance in the search market. It was quick to devour rivals Alta Vista, and former dominant player Yahoo. Nothing could stop the juggernaut of Google. Rival newcomers like Bing are trying to cut into Google's dominance, and starting to succeed, but this only touches the tip of the iceberg of Google's vast storehouse of ideas and innovations. The recent release of the superior, ultra-fast Chrome Browser quickly carved out a niche among the elite browsers, cutting into the marketshare of rival Firefox. Google has also recently released a Chrome-only Netbook, that manages to do all of the things a personal computer should do - word processing, e-mail, calender, photos, and games - through just the chrome browser, with no need for any other operating system! Talk about working in the cloud, imagine if your computer only accessed the internet, and kept nothing on file that wasn't cleared with the browser cache!

The Google Android series of phones are also becoming the dominant force in portable cellphone technology. The early dominance of Apple's innovative iPhone has fallen by the wayside to Google's superior cellphone networks, available on Verizon and T-Mobile, All-Tell, and more. iPhone's reliance on AT&T's inferior network has driven consumers to the Google's Smartphones, and app store, carving away at the marketshare of Apple's supposedly dominant device.

Google's current stock price seems high, until you consider that this company isn't done innovating, growing, and shaping society! Search is only the beginning! The company is leading the technological innovations in green tech through various grant programs, and innovations in game design that can come through browser-based HTML.5 and later. Google may be more valuable than gold. Gold hedges against failure, while Google drives the future of technological innovation!

Though they could open up their coffers and start paying a healthy dividend, they seem to be more interested in driving forward with their earth-shaping innovations. The future will be shaped by Google!

With the release of the iPad, Apple did the same thing they did with the release of the iPhone: They create a market for a product that did not exist until Apple launched their product! There's nothing more innovative than re-inventing the way everyone thinks about phones and personal computing. The drive towards cloud computing is bound up in the name and reputation of Apple and Apple products. CEO Steve Jobs didn't even let a liver transplant slow down his push to shape the future of technology. He came back from his surgery a stronger leader than ever, ready to drive his company into the next century prepared to shape the way everyone thinks about technology.

The iPad's success is coupled with the fact that no one seems capable of creating a similar-quality tablet device! Blackberry's tablet was a flop. Other companies, like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, are slow to put a product on the market, and even slower to implement the sort of app-store product base that consumers demand. Gone are the days of going to the store to buy software. Now, consumers hop over to the appstore on their browser, and point and click to quickly download the software they need the moment they need it.

The success of iTunes has also reinvented the way music is consumed. The piracy of music has declined in the wake of easy access to inexpensive, relatively disposable MP3's through the iTunes store. The iTunes store also served as a precursor to popular cloud-based TV and movie-watching companies like Netflix and Hulu. Apple is still innovating. Their recent release of the iPad 2 has come with rave reviews, and waiting lists for their products.

What they plan to do next is anyone's guess, but the world's most valuable brand will certainly be doing anything standing still! Their high stock price reflects not only their current success, but the respect and admiration investors have for the brand's innovative future!

The innovation war between Apple and Google is bound to bring out the best in these giants of American technological industry. The only that's certain is that the consumer will be the beneficiary, and that means the companies will likely continue to grow in value, and continue to produce value for their investors.

The author of this article does not own stock in either Apple or Google directly, but does own shares of a mutual fund that invests in both.