Tech fails miserably in Forbes' most innovative companies

Re: Dinosaur

"The difference between them is the bonus given by equity investors on the educated hunch that the company will continue to come up with profitable new growth"

In other words: this is a list of the 100 companies most over-valued by the market. So how come Apple didn't make it?

Re: Dinosaur

Not really a dinosaur - think of the Forbes List as sponsored content; they're just doing what everybody else does, so quite current really.

Re: Silly-con Valley

Unfortunately vendor lock in occurs because the typical moron who reads Forbes only plays buzzword bingo with technology. They have no grasp that open standards and formats make everyone's life easier because the threat of leaving a vendor has some real teeth.

Re: Silly-con Valley

I once heard Silicon valley described as "a human centipede of marketeers"

Re: Chipotle?

"It also includes plenty of companies that have notably done poorly in the past year, a good example being fast-food company Chipotle."

Of course they're doing badly, they don't even know how to spell their own food, which is chilpotle. Dios mio.

Re: Chipotle?

> I am actually surprised Forbes did not include Theranos

Whose anus?

Re: "What is the value of the list? Who knows?"

Oi!

Screwing over workers, customers, and dodging taxes are not only innovative, they're patentable business models in the USA.

Re: "What is the value of the list? Who knows?"

The value of the "list" isn't for the likes of us or even the users of tech. It's for investors, stock-analysts, and those who only look at the bottom line and the size of their bonus. It's willy-waving for the wealthy at best.

Re: "What is the value of the list? Who knows?"

Err.. not quite. Taxis co.s or regulated city monopolies have been screwing over their customers for years so at least on that front uber is innovative.

Re: Seriously?

Amazon is also AWS, not only the store. Facebook too is more innovative when it tries to design new ways to move and store your data to be analyzed and resold, not for its web frontend and silly features.

Pharma is innovative? I didn't see many true innovations lately, especially since most of them usually come fro more fundamental researches which are not usually carried over in their labs because the ROI is unknown.

But Forbes is a financial company, it looks at money, not ideas and quality.

Re: Seriously?

Forbes is making a common mistake. Innovation is about using a new way to attack existing problems to create a new solution. Amazon, for example, is a giant, worldwide retailer. Bezos' genius was to take a couple of ideas floating around at the time and combine them. The ideas were to use the Internet to allow customers to shop and to use the backend of a catalog shopping firm. In some respects, Amazon has always been a giant catalog shopping firm with the shopping done online.

Also many technologies considered innovative are actually rather old. Digital photography is much older than most realize by about 20 years and was invented by Kodak. It was popularized later when enough people had computers that digital image manipulation and sharing became reasonable.

So why is Amazon on the list? Have they ever made a profit?

Re: Obviously I'm a little biased

Are there sizeable non-public companies this methodology is overlooking?

One example pops to mind - Samsung (the conglomerate) - has been mentioned as a private thing, not a regular public company people can buy shares in.

Re: What is "tech"?

Worse - tech success used to mean solving customer problems. Now it means restricting the use of powerful hardware and using your network-effect lock-in in combination with "support & maintenance."

IBM must be feeling so nostalgic.

Re: What is "tech"?

> Genuine question.

It's short of "information technology" (IT), or if you're trying to sound really modern, "information and computing technology" (ICT).

This means: stuff involving computers crunching data (the precursor of information).

> the big car makers who are transitioning to hybrid drives

Hybrid drive is a terrible idea from a technological point of view and it was Japan's attempt at getting their cars into lower tax bands, which if anything is market, not technology, innovation.

> There is the suspicion

No disrespect, but you need to get an education.