Saturday, November 05, 2011

Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 3rd edition

Top end of the scale is 15. It's a linear scale.

My personal scale rates large for-profit corporations. CARE International is provided as a baseline measure and Philip Morris shall forever define the upper limits of corporate evil.

  1. Philip Morris: 15
  2. Exxon: 13
  3. Goldman Sachs: 12
  4. United Healthcare: 11
  5. AT&T and Verizon (tied): 11
  6. Facebook: 10
  7. Google: 8
  8. Average publicly traded company: 8
  9. Microsoft: 7
  10. Apple: 5
  11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)What's your ranking?

There's been a lot of action since the 2009 1st edition. Google was once tied with Apple, but the manner and actions of the Reader affair moved them, for the first time, above Microsoft. They're heading into Facebook territory, even as Facebook itself is improving. AT&T and Verizon are slowly rising up the scale , breaking into the top five for the first time.

Conversely Microsoft has been relatively angelic over the past two years. They are incompetent, yes, but this is a scale of corporate evilness. Similarly Netflix is not so much evil as incompetent.

Apple, for all its sins, has stayed relatively low on the chart. They take our money, they mostly give us what we expect. They did nuke several customer services, but with a 1 year warning (vs. Google's 1 week warning before eliminating my shared reader items).

Some past editions for comparison:

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