Fortune or People Magazine?

I was reading Fortune’s 50 smartest people in tech and had to stop and check the cover a couple of times to make sure I had not picked up another of Time’s consumery publications

Fortune has for decades faithfully cataloged for us corporate business and its ups and downs through its various 500 listings. But when it comes to technology it only grudgingly catalogs what those companies are doing with their IT budgets, and their R&D labs. I mean there are 85 Fortune 500 CIOs/CTOs within driving distance of its headquarters and when I have asked Fortune journalists why they don’t cover them the answer is usually some polite version of “that stuff is boring”.  Boring or not, that is Fortune’s corporate bread and butter.

So, I am not entirely surprised that it names only one CIO – that of American Airlines – in its list of 50

Are you kidding me? No mention of BMW some of whose cars now have a hundred million lines of software code and hundreds of sensors? No mention of what is going on at the GE Global Research Center a few hundred miles from Fortune HQ where research is being done in technologies most of us could not even spell? Nothing on what is going on at NASA or NOAA? I could go on and on.

Seriously, Fortune enough fawning around Apple and Facebook and Twitter. Get back to your Fortune 500 Industrials roots. Plenty of whiz bang technology – and smart technologists - waiting to be profiled.