“Business is the instrument that mankind has settled on to propagate change. Take a long step back and what do you see? A world of invention and unintended consequences,” Fortune Editors write.
“Other things make the world go round as well—love, principally, and coffee—but there is nothing quite like the study of business to illuminate where we have been and where we are going,” Fortune writes. “The poet Archibald MacLeish, when he was a staff writer at Fortune, described his job as to ‘report the world of business as an expression — a peculiarly enlightening expression — of the Republic, of the changing world.'”
Fortune writes, “It has become a bit of a catchphrase among tech people to say that one’s company is going to ‘change the world.’ Many companies do, in small ways. But disrupting, say, the taxi business is not going to set future historians atwitter (though Twitter conceivably might). We surveyed Fortune’s brain trust to come up with a ranking of the 27 companies that have done the most to alter the way we live.”
The Top 3, in order are: Standard Oil, AT&T, and McCormick Harvesting Machine Co.
Tech companies that made Fortune’s list:
10. Google
16. Apple
19. Sony
21. Facebook
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Placing Google 6 places ahead of Apple on list of companies that changed the world, tells you all you need to know about how much Fortune understands world-changing companies.
From Fortune’s Google description: “Think of Google as a factory for major innovations, from self-driving cars to wearable computers to technology for extending the lifespan of humans.”
Our Lady of Perpetual Beta’s experiments vs. Apple, a company that changed the world in myriad, profound, lasting ways, including: Popularized and defined the personal computer (three times! (Apple II, Mac, iPad), invented the PDA with Newton (and killed it with iPhone), popularized and defined the portable media player (iPod), created the digital music industry (iTunes Store), created the modern pocketable computer (iPhone), created the touch-based personal computer (iPad), and created the modern software distribution model (App Store). These are things have changed billions of people’s lives. Not things that roughly fourteen people have tested (self-driving cars) and pie-in-the-sky projects (extending the lifespan of humans) that have so far changed bupkis. How much credit does Fortune give Google for creating $1,500 glasses for assholes?
It’s ludicrous. So ludicrous, in fact, that – if we had to guess – it was done by Fortune on purpose in order to generate “controversy” and page views.