Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Meta make TIME's list of 100 most influential companies

Microsoft Logo 2022 (Image credit: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central)

What you need to know

TIME just shared its list of the 100 most influential companies.
Microsoft made the list, as did Amazon, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA.
TIME pointed to Microsoft's massive plans to acquire Activision Blizzard and the company's overall strong performance in its section dedicated to the tech giant.

Each year, TIME comes out with a list of the 100 most influential companies. Microsoft made this year's list, as did Amazon, Meta, Apple, and several other tech giants. According to TIME, it looks at relevance, impact, innovation, leadership, ambition, and success to determine the influence of a company.

Over the last year, Microsoft announced several major acquisitions and beat earnings expectations. The company was also very active in the political space, including speaking out about the war in Ukraine.

Here is TIME's snippet on Microsoft that summarizes why the company earned a spot on this year's list:

Xbox maker Microsoft stunned gamers in January by announcing plans to acquire Activision/Blizzard, publisher of Call of Duty and Overwatch. The company says the nearly $70 billion deal would help it serve the world's 3 billion gamers. However, the planned tie-up, which sparked a wave of similar moves across the $200 billion gaming industry, has invited regulatory scrutiny. More broadly, CEO Satya Nadella's Microsoft has been on a hot streak, beating expectations with $51.7 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter.

Microsoft was categorized in the Titans section of the list alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and NVIDIA. OpenAI, which received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019 made TIME's list as well.

Microsoft's inclusion in the list is not a surprise. The tech giant was on the same list from TIME last year, and CEO Satya Nadella has been considered one of the world's most influential people by the outlet in the past.

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

4 Comments

Amazingly, largest or second largest company in the world (depending on which day you look at the stock values) might be one of the top 100 most influential.
Yeah talk about damned with faint praise. The only way this would be news is if they somehow weren't influential. Of course as we've learned they may have simply bribed their way onto the list...
It's not news because MS is so obviously influential, but you still suggest it was due to bribery? Hey, I can do that too: Booooring! But maybe it was the Lizard People.
Not a bad list if a bit heavy on startups; too presentist but excusable if you consider it a list of who made "noise" in 2021. What saves them is the list is by categories with only a handful in each so you can judge each grouping independently. And most of the groupings make sense, particularly TITANS and DISRUPTORS. Many fit in more than one but they did a good enough job of flagging their role in 2021. Good enough.
Now we can forget the whole thing until next spring. 😊