2016’s Business Winners and Losers

<i>It’s hard to read the tech news without coming across a Google-related story each day, and usually with a positive slant</i><p><i>the MacBook Pro was widely parodied</i><p>This reads more as a summarization of 2016 press sentiment than a rigorous analysis of whether companies are &quot;winning or losing&quot;. How many Pixels did Google sell? How many MBPs did Apple sell?

It seems no one in the comments, even OP, seems to understand how this type of list works. It&#x27;s not based on sales or a hard metric. It&#x27;s just based on the zeitgeist, &quot;the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history.&quot;

He is putting apple in the same category as twitter, yahoo and theranos. Really? At this point it is becoming cliche to predict the demise of Apple.

Good list, makes sense actually. The come-back of Microsoft, and what they seem to have in store (MS Teams, Hololens) is particularly impressive.

Sad that there are either &quot;winners&quot; or &quot;losers&quot; and no &quot;treading water&quot; but I&#x27;m guessing if they aren&#x27;t mentioned they are in the treading water space.<p>But the other challenge is what is captured here is not an object measurement instead it is &quot;performance against expectations&quot; which makes people like Apple a &quot;loser&quot; even though they shipped more product and made more money than Google a &quot;winner.&quot;<p>The EVP of marketing at NetApp used to have a chart on their wall which had all of NetApp&#x27;s competitors and an arrow next to it, which was their &quot;path&quot; and the path could be up, forward, or down. It had a similar feel. It is useful as a leading indicator of future challenges. And by that I mean that you can miss expectations one year and be fine, but miss for 2 or more years in a row, or regularly have a miss every few years, and its harder to be perceived as the leader.

Google is winner? What do they do now? I don&#x27;t remember being excited about their product for a long time. 2008 if you exclude Android. Seriously. Gmail inbox partitioning was a good thing.

An highly relevent metric to include would be annual net return vs industry benchmarks. It directly describes the changes in investor sentiment about future profitability, rather than relying on subjective assessment of the average tone of press coverage. Change in revenue, gross and net profit are also informative metrics, directy measuring change in current market-share and profitability.

While not perfect, the 2016 stock return relative to that of other technology companies is a good baseline for assessing who was a winner and who was a loser. 2016 equity performance is an excellent indicator of how NEW information impacted the long term prospects of these companies relative to consensus expectations.

Based on Zeitgeist I&#x27;d say Palantir was a huge winner. Sadly, I feel the shift towards way more surveillance is only a matter of time in many European countries. All ethics aside, If I had to pick one company where all my money went it would be them.

No mention of AMD and Nvidia both of which have grown 3+x over 2016. It makes sense, they are the Levi Strauss&#x27; of deep learning (in that they are selling shovels during a gold rush).

This reads like a sports news flash.<p>Not sure if this is good or bad, just an observation.

The site itself is not much of a winner: the text is right there inside the HTML body but it&#x27;s invisible unless JavaScript is turned on. What for?