PC World just released their 100 Best Products of the Year list. They have a Companies of the Year section and it warmed my heart to see what was in there. Yahoo! was named Best Web Company of the Year! Cool!
Yahoo has progressed far beyond being a mere search engine; it has emerged as the number-one online developer, on the strength of great revamps of Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Maps, smart acquisitions of Web stars such as Del.icio.us and Flickr, and development of the Yahoo 360 personalized Web spaces and of the Yahoo Music Engine. Google may get a lot more attention, but Yahoo has been getting more things accomplished.Unfortunately, on the flipside, the company that I left for Yahoo! was named...Worst Company of the Year: Sony.
We get the feeling that Sony doesn't trust people. Many of its ills over the past year involve copy protection: First was the fiasco with its music CDs, which installed rootkits on PCs to hide digital rights management spyware, thereby exposing the computers to viruses. Then came delays in the delivery of Blu-ray drives due to difficulties implementing a second copy protection scheme. And as a result of the Blu-ray problems, Sony had to push back its PlayStation 3 console to November. All this from the company that virtually pioneered copying with the Betamax.It is a nice jump though, from worst to best...