It's curtains for the energy giant Exxon Mobil (XOM  ) on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIA  ), as cloud-based software company Salesforce.com (CRM  ) now takes its place. Exxon isn't the only company getting replaced on the market index either, but it is the oldest.

Exxon Mobile has been a part of the Dow since 1928 in one form or another. Now it's being replaced with the future: software, and it's not the only one. Pfizer (PFE  ) and Raytheon Technologies (RTX  ) are also getting swapped out for Amgen (AMGN  ) and Honeywell International (HON  ). All of these changes will be in effect as of August 31.

According to Raymond James, these changes are a sign of the times, as the company and the broad energy sector lags behind technology names.

"In removing Exxon from the DJIA, the index provider is clearly being reactive, and indeed accentuating the extremely negative investor sentiment on just about anything tied to oil and gas," Raymond James' analyst Pavel Molchanov wrote in a note to clients, quoted by CNBC.

All of these changes are essentially thanks to Apple's (AAPL  ) upcoming 4-to-1 split. Their split means the Dow needs a re-weighing to diversify the index. While Pfizer was one of the worst performing stocks of 2019, there was also interest in it as the company worked towards a COVID-19 vaccine with German biotech BioNTech (BTNX  ). However, as their stocks continued to fall, leading the Dow to remove it in favor of Amgen. Raytheon was also falling as well, leading to their swap with Honeywell.

Five years ago, the energy sector made up nearly 7% of the S&P 500 (SPY  ), and nearly 11% 10 years ago. Today it only makes up just 2.5%, while we have seen technology jump from 18.48% in 2010 to 28.17% now. The big five tech stocks, Apple (AAPL  ), Microsoft (MSFT  ), Amazon (AMZN  ), Alphabet (GOOG  ), and Facebook (FB  ), are each individually larger than the entire U.S. energy sector.

Thanks to an increasingly negative view on oil and gas, investors are ditching energy in favor of something more lucrative, like software and tech. This could be the start of a huge shift to tech, or even open up the market for cleaner energy .