Numbers can be funny sometimes; just as they can be hurtful. When your friend gets a zero on a test, it’s funny as hell. When you get the same, it’s a pain beyond words. So I guess it’s the perspective that makes the numbers good or bad.
Why am I ranting about numbers and perspective, you ask? Well, to be brutally honest, it’s because I need some way to justify the absurdity of a certain set of stats, and then live with it. This is what I am talking about:
A new study find that the company with most innovative employees is NOT Apple, Google or Facebook, it’s Microsoft!
The study was conducted by Good&CO, an online platform that matches companies and employees using algorithms and data mapping.
Samar Birwadker, founder and CEO of Good&CO, explained the findings of this study. He said: “The study data tell us that in terms of adventurousness, Microsoft employees tend to be neck-and-neck with Apple’s, and much more adventurous than Google, Facebook, or IBM employees.”
Now, we have no tangible proof of what the term “adventurousness” constitutes, but we can only assume that it accounts for the audacity that the designers and engineers possess when it comes to making new products. You can say that I am biased towards Apple, but tell me honestly, do you really think that Microsoft designs more groundbreaking products than Apple?
Birwadker had a few things to say about Facebook’s poor performance as well: “They (Facebook) have always had that reputation [of being innovative], and I think that now becomes a subconscious thing, that Facebook is innovative, but the current place they are in as a business doesn’t require them to be personally innovative,”
A case of bad innovation
To be fair, and in my humble opinion, Facebook is being innovative. In fact, they have been more innovative than perhaps any other company in the past five years or so. Except that, they have been innovative for all the wrong reasons. The sheer amount of effort and money that Facebook has been putting into manipulating the market, especially in India (remember ‘free wifi’?), and even trying to hoodwink the users into sharing their data (go read WhatsApp’s latest privacy policy) is nothing short of a disgrace.
Coming back to the point of innovation, the study claims that while the employees of Microsoft and Google tend to have “scored better” while testing for innovativeness, Apple races ahead by “providing a working atmosphere” that’s better at harnessing that creative spirit. And perhaps that’s why it translates better to actual innovation with Apple and no so much with Microsoft.
Numbers are for noobs
Be that as it may, we don’t really care for the stats. Numbers are for noobs, and it matters nought to us who comes first and who comes second. All we care about it that Apple continues to churn out amazing, ground-breaking products, which it certainly seems to be doing better than others!!
