Time magazine calls Apple’s iPhone the invention of the year, and it’s hard to beat that call. In fact, Apple could also be the company of the year…
This makes it official, it’s November 1st and we’re going to be deluged by 1,000,001 such lists between now and early January, 2008.
Of course, the one that might be a non-debate is who is the company of the year? We asked that question as early as April 23rd when I ran down 13 companies who stood out from 1994 to 2006 and asked who 2007’s pick would be.
Since you can still vote:
I won’t say who I am leaning towards, but I will say that as of April 23rd, both Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Om Malik of GigaOm agreed with me… time will tell if any one of us have changed minds.
Previous winners include:
1994: AOL.com
1995: Netscape
1996: Altavista
1997: eBay
1998: Yahoo!
1999: Amazon.com
2000: Lycos
2001: Napster
2002: Google
2003: Cisco
2004: Skype
2005: MySpace
2006: YouTube
2007: ?
The list has many companies that started with a bang and seemingly will end it with a whimper. Then it has others who started off slowly and ended strongly.
The leaders, invariably, are Facebook, who despite MySpace’s continued dominance in social networking and Google’s continued dominance in all things search, Facebook kicked it up a notch or two… this all culminated with an investment of $240M by MSFT that valued them at $15B… when you consider that just last year Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo!’s $1.6B deal and YouTube got acquired for $1.65B, you can’t help but be amazed.
So, who do you think is the company of 2007 if not Facebook? I think aQuantive’s $6B sale to MSFT gives them a lot of votes… and of course, Google will always remain a perennial candidate. But what about MSFT? It’s going to do nearly $60B in annual sales and is really well positioned online with Live.com/MSN.com, aQuantive and of course, its deal with Facebook.
As well, we’re going to do a repeat of 2006’s Top 10 Storylines in Tech and Web soon, and have another yet-to-be named special feature coming soon. Now vote for this year’s company of the year:
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