Apple has taken the top spot in Fortune’s most admired companies for the fourth straight year.
[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Fortune asked businesspeople to vote for the companies they most admired, in any industry. Following behind Apple is Google, a company that has been increasingly competing with Apple in more markets over the last couple of years.
Rounding out the top 20 companies on Fortune’s list of 50 are Berkshire Hathaway; Southwest Airlines; Procter & Gamble; Coca-Cola; Amazon.com; FedEx; Microsoft; McDonald’s; Wal-Mart Stores; IBM; General Electric; Walt Disney; 3M; Starbucks; Johnson & Johnson; Singapore Airlines; BMW; and American Express.
You can view the list by location, best and worst, No.1s or by industry.
Apple-haters like to claim that the company’s popularity is due to its marketing skills. I like to think it’s because of a *lack* of marketing, compared to most of the other entities on that list.
You can be sure people are gunning for Apple. You already see it with hired guns like John Battelle tweeting that Apple and Steve Jobs is a liar. There is a phenomenon in America, maybe other countries of the world also, that really resents success. And you can see with the success of the iPhone and now the iPad the seething look in people eyes – some of them competitors and others just petty complainers – the frothing antipathy they have for the acceptance of these new paradigm shifting technologies. It easy to loose respect daily for Battelle and his lack of ability to carefully monitor and analyze the technology field without letting petty emotion to enter in but I think there is a larger phenom going on here. Resentment. Envy of others success. I remember a time when we all celebrated innovation – if Microsoft added incredible new features in Word to set up tables and export data from tables into Excel or make labels, whatever… if Netscape added email capabilities, when Apple introduced the first digital camera to capture images and transfer them to your computer easily (they got out of the business fast) or if Lotus or WordPerfect or any number of a whole bunch of companies reveled in the idea of creating new and exciting products. But today everybody grows bitter. They are not motivated by the desire to innovate but instead to annihilate the “competition.” You have to ask yourself, what did Battelle ever contribute? Nothing. That’s why he sits on the sideline and tweets snide little stupidities.
How true. I remember back in the ’90s when you had to fight for your right to be a Mac user and everyone thought Apple would file for bankruptcy or go out of business. Oracle’s Larry Ellison offered to buy Apple back then. However one feels, pro or con, about Apple and Mr Jobs, you have to admit it’s one of the greatest comebacks in business history.