This month’s Fast Company magazine has a listing of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies”. While it is a great article, it has some traditional “low-tech” companies such as Wal-mart mixed in with the tech companies. I recognize that some of these companies are doing some very innovative things, many don’t have technology that is useful in our daily lives today. So I have created my own list of the 10 most innovative companies in my opinion, with products and services that you should be using today.
1- Amazon.com – Through the deployment and monetization of their Services they have singlehandedly popularized the cloud-computing industry.
2- Google — Big Surprise here. Google is designing products/services that are giving Microsoft a run for their money, too bad they are not as polished and as capable as Microsoft’s products. However, Microsoft has a 20 year jump on Google.
3- Sun Microsystems — Sun is taking on power consumption in data centers with some of the most unique designs in the server hardware segment that I have seen years.
4- Microsoft — Vista in all of its glory, or lack there of have in a way lit a fire under Microsoft. The new versions of some of it’s products are looking promising. Pair this with the fear of God that Google has struck into them, Microsoft is finally making a whole-hearted effort into moving some of their applications online.
5- Revision 3 — Kevin Rose and Company have taken on the network studios by producing full-length high-quality shows that are free. The networks should be very afraid of these guys.
6- Apple — They made my list simply for the iPhone SDK and Enterprise support. These will transform the mobile phone industry.
7- Zimbra (A Yahoo! Company) — These guys have been working hard to produce a viable, complete alternative to Exchange. They have succeeded, after using their collaboration suite over the last 6 months I do not miss Exchange at all.
8- VMWare — Using their Virtualization patents to throw their weight around these guys rule the Virtualization market. One such product that has made them a household name is VMWare Fusion for the Mac. Also, by giving away their VMWare Server product they have firmly cemented their place at the top of this market for the foreseeable future.
9- Intel — They make my list for simply making CPU’s smaller and more power efficient, such as the one used in the MacBook Air
10- OpenOffice.org — Another example of a feature complete Microsoft alternative that is making a active effort to make their as ubiquitous as possible on as many platforms as possible.
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