Best-of-Breed Companies
Posted on Friday, 24 October 2008 at 09:49 PM
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Stracia
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Stracia
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The following companies represent the best-of-breed players in their respective industries, in the opinion of Stracia’s Best-of-Breeds Editor, BoB. Rather than explain his reasoning, BoB will let readers determine which companies need to be added to or removed from this list.
You can post a comment below with any thoughts or suggestions. You can also e-mail BoB.
| Aerospace & defense: | Lockheed Martin (LMT) |
| Automobiles: | Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) |
| Footwear: | Nike (NKE) |
| Household products: | Procter & Gamble (PG) |
| Investment banking: | Goldman, Sachs (GS) |
| Money-center banks: | Wells Fargo (WFC) |
| Oil - equipment & services: | Schlumberger (SLB) |
| Oil - integrated majors: | Exxon Mobil (XOM) |
| Pharmaceuticals: | Merck & Co. Inc. (MRK) |
| Retailers - Big-box electronics: | Best Buy (BBY) |
| Retailers - Big-box discounters: | Wal-Mart (WMT) |
| Retailers - Drug store: | Walgreen (WAG) |
| Semiconductors: | Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN) |
| Telecommunications equipment: | QUALCOMM Inc. (QCOM) |
| Telecommunications services: | Verizon Wireless (VZ) |
Read the latest headlines on our best-of-breeds with Yahoo News by Ticker.
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Reader Comments (3)
BoB, our editor for this page, added Verizon Communications (VZ) in the "telecom services" best-of-breed. But we hope he meant wireless services, because as customers we view VZ's wireline business as a mess.
So is every telecom services company. They lose money on wireline, but bundle it with wireless and cable or satellite. Or in Verizon's case, FIOS. Plus, VZ just got approval for the Alltel deal.
We are Verizon (VZ) customers and several weeks ago, we modified our wireline plan. VZ completely fumbled the service change and related billing issues -- which we spent an hour on hold trying to resolve. It should have taken two minutes -- no, it shouldn't have happened at all. The customer service that we did get was terrible.
VZ may have been approved to purchase Alltel (AT), but will that do anything to improve its ability to handle customer and service issues? Just the opposite, we would guess.
But it's your call, BoB. So we have changed "wireless services" to "telecom services." If this kind of service constitutes best-of-breed globally then it's a sorry state of affairs.