Apple is world’s most admired company, again
For the third year running, Apple has beat out all of the other major corporate players and come in first as the most admired company on the planet, which may not be surprising given their performance this year.
The award is given out each year by Fortune Magazine, who performs an annual survey of investors and industry analysts and tabulates the results of those surveys into an ordered list. There are a number of performance areas that are considered in the surveys, including innovation, people management, social responsibility, quality of management, and quality of products and services. Being analysts and investors, you can be sure that the takers of the survey also take into consideration the financial performance of the company, even if only as a way to judge the response of consumers to their products and services.
The list had a number of tech industry entries in the top 50, not surprising in our technically savvy world society. In fact, Google came in at number two, also again, showing how much innovation in the tech industry is respected by people that care about their money. Amazon did well at 5th. Apple’s arch rival Microsoft did not fare nearly as well, ending up in 11th place and out of the top 10, despite the successful launch of a new operating system this year, according to a Bit-tech story. IBM came in 15th, with Cisco Systems a surprising 20th. Intel finished 31st while Hewlett-Packard came 32nd. EBay was 40th, while Nokia was 41st. If you think of all the companies that did not make the list at all, of course, placing in the top 50 is very impressive indeed.
Part of the reason that Apple doubled their stock price in a year of global recession is that consumers see its products as being good value for the money, despite being priced higher than much of the competition. This award recognizes that exact open-market-based sort of superior appeal, as measured by the appeal of the company and its stock, driven by marketplace performance. All of Apple should feel particularly shiny today.
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March 8th, 2010
My brother and I were formatting his Dell PC and while we are at it he told me “I will never again buy a PC. Hey, I am going to buy us a Mac desktop and give this POS to the kids.”