Blowing hot and cool

would you rather be in the BusinessWeek Hot Vendor List?

“with the help of Standard & Poor's Compustat, we comb through the financial results for tens of thousands of publicly traded businesses to find those that have done the best over the past year. We rank companies on four criteria: shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues, and revenue growth. Those with the best aggregate ranking go to the top of the list.”

or would you rather be in Gartner’s Cool Vendor list?

“Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn't do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.”

So, what are the differences?

• BW has a list of 100, Gartner 250+ across 40+ categories.
• BWs scoring is financial metric based, Gartner’s subjective (wonder how they score vendors on “intriguing”?)
• BW’s list only considers public companies, most in Gartner’s lists are private.
• BW list is public on their site. Gartner’s is hidden way behind their firewall  - many of the vendors have press releases on the web about their individually being named “cool”, but guess how many bother to share the whole list :)

So would you rather be hot or cool?