Tabla de contenidos para February 2020 en Fortune

A DAY BEFORE THIS ISSUE of the magazine went to press in mid-January, I went to a hipster workspace in Manhattan to hear Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talk about the future. Naturally, he began by talking about the past. When Nadella joined the company as a 25-year-old computer scientist in 1992, Microsoft’s stated purpose as a corporation was to put “a computer on every desk and in every home,” as founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen famously enshrined it. Under Gates’ successor as CEO, Steve Ballmer, the mission statement went through a wordy rewrite—one that seemed to lose both its clarity and its real-world ambition. And not long after Nadella took the reins in 2014, the statement got another revise, one that has stuck until now: Microsoft’s mission is…

THE CHINESE CHAIN Luckin Coffee is staking its future on two bold ideas. First, that a tech-driven retail model can satisfy customers, and second, and more important, that Chinese consumers will actually drink coffee. Last summer, the company listed on Nasdaq, raising over $500 million at a valuation north of $4 billion. With this funding, the company has ramped up its dizzying growth strategy. Founded in 2017, Luckin has already opened more than 3,600 locations in China at a pace that will soon enable it to surpass Starbucks’ 4,100. The strategy has divided analysts: Luckin bulls point toward profits the company has posted on a store level, but pessimists remain wary of the company’s heavy spending on expansion and marketing. “If [their aggressiveness] works out, you’ve hit one over…

FINANCIAL FUTURES were created in the 1970s at a time of very high interest rates and inflation. Those economic ills were cured by the mid-1980s. Oil futures were created in the early 1980s at a time of shortages and volatile prices. The oil market stabilized a few years later. Stabilization of prices and supply happened because industry participants could transfer risk and achieve predictable pricing while speculators could find trading opportunities. Today, it is health care costs that are out of control and that have risen to unsustainable levels. Insurance premiums and co-pays are at record highs, and some insurance companies are refusing to pay for some of the most expensive treatments. Capital market tools can do for health care what they did for interest rates and energy—provide stability…

FOR AN ASTOUNDING 13TH STRAIGHT YEAR, Apple claims the top spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a survey of almost 3,800 executives, directors, and analysts. It’s anything but an unlucky number: The streak reflects Apple’s consistent, potent performance; it also coincides almost exactly with the life span of the indomitably profitable iPhone. But the stability at No. 1 belies the drama elsewhere on our All-Stars list. Microsoft, rejuvenated by its success in cloud computing, cracks the top three for the first time in 16 years. Warehouse retailer Costco and enterprise software pioneer Salesforce make their debuts in the top 10. And Boeing and Facebook tumble entirely out of the top 50, as concerns over the trustworthiness of their products and services erode their standing with…

“There are a lot of advantages of scale. It allows us to take a long-term view and be very user-focused.” WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE NEW BOSS When did Larry Page and Sergey Brin tell you about the change? PICHAI It was a series of conversations over time. As Google turned 20 last year [in 2018], that was the first time I think they probably started having longer-term conversations. Particularly when Google hit 21 in September, that was a kind of a milestone. They did actually speak about it with me in the context of the company turning 21, like a child ready to be independent. And they did want to play a different role as advisers and founders. Alphabet was formed, and you became CEO of Google, in…

TROUBLE IS BREWING when the owners of a business and the managers who run that business see the world in fundamentally different ways. That’s the uncomfortable situation right now at America’s publicly traded corporations. The owners—investors—see a brilliant future for U.S. companies, bidding their stocks up to record highs. But the managers—CEOs—see a far darker future, as revealed in surveys of CEO sentiment. The contrast is starker than it has been in years, perhaps decades. “Somebody’s wrong,” says investment strategist Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates, “and is going to have to change their plans.” Investors’ ebullience is obvious in the stock market, where dollars do the talking. But the deep pessimism of CEOs is less visible and has gone largely unnoticed. They’re invariably upbeat when speaking to investors, but…

A SUPREME COURT decision that wins bipartisan praise is about as rare as a backdoor cover on a seven-team parlay. And if you know what a backdoor cover on a seven-team parlay is, you may know which decision we’re referring to. In Murphy v. NCAA, in May 2018, the court struck down a federal law that had effectively banned commercial sports betting in most states—a move that earned praise from gamblers of every political stripe. In the wake of the ruling, 14 states have passed laws allowing some form of sports betting. On Feb. 2, Super Bowl LIV will serve as the latest example of the shift’s financial impact. Last year, gamblers placed an estimated $6 billion in legal bets on the Super Bowl, up 26% from 2018. And…

SPERM AND EGGS have invaded the Pennsylvania Convention Center. At one end of the hall, a giant sperm poised to fertilize an ovum the size of a small weather balloon rotates above a booth marketing egg banking services. Nearby, an enormous mobile composed of more sperm and eggs—this time wearing eerie human faces—grins down from the rafters. Another booth is handing out stress balls with unmissable squiggly tails, while attendees crowd around an arcade game for the chance to win T-shirts stashed inside—what else?—golden eggs. Granted, there’s only so much iconography the fertility world has to draw on, but the sheer volume of genetic material floating around the convention center is a sign that the industry, once considered niche and boutique, is ready to go mass market. It was…

AFTER WORLD WAR II, men’s daily fashion began to evolve toward the casual look we enjoy today. Denim jeans, leather jackets, and rugged boots all derive from either military garb or workwear that, before the 1960s, men rarely sported outside the workplace. Teenagers shook off Dad’s suit, looking to Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) for an edgier dress code. But what young men wore on their wrists remained dainty (by modern standards): dress watches with cases barely larger than a quarter, made of gold-capped steel and offering little to no water resistance. Then, in 1964, the James Bond thriller Goldfinger featured Sean Connery sporting a Rolex Submariner Ref. 6538 under the cuff of a white tuxedo jacket, a…

THE 50 ALL-STARS THESE COMPANIES WON ADMIRING VOTES FROM INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THEIR INDUSTRIES. INDUSTRY STANDOUTS AS RANKED BY THEIR PEERS EVEN THEIR RIVALS ADMIRE THESE LEADERS THE SCORING SYSTEM for Fortune’s Most Admired Companies survey favors companies whose peers recognize that they do many different things well. (See the adjoining column for more on our methodology.) No company illustrates that point better than Apple, which topped our All-Stars list. We ask survey respondents to rate companies on nine performance criteria. This year, Apple earned scores in the top 10—across all industries—on eight of those criteria, and it got the highest scores of any company in any industry in the talent-attraction category. Walt Disney also cracked the top 10 in eight categories. That stellar performance helped The Mouse win the…

BUSINESS. DISTILLED. WHY DID VIRTUALLY every top pollster and pundit get the 2016 election screamingly wrong? On election eve, the New York Times analytical unit and the PredictWise prediction market aggregator showed Hillary Clinton winning by wide margins. FiveThirtyEight gave her a 71% chance of winning. The Princeton Election Consortium’s Sam Wang put the probability at 93% and said he’d “eat a bug” if Donald Trump won; Wang later ate a cricket on CNN. Even Trump’s staff didn’t think he could capture the White House. A senior campaign staffer told CNN on election night, “It will take a miracle for us to win.” Yet a radically different kind of analysis, entirely overlooked at the time, got it right. This assessment considered the candidates not as politicians or even as people…

The hype about artificial intelligence is unavoidable. From Beijing to Seattle, companies are investing vast sums into these data-hungry systems in the belief that they will profoundly transform the business landscape. To better gauge its true impact, we studied A.I.’s use in hiring and drug discovery, examined its rapid rise in China, and went deep on Big Tech’s quest to build true thinking machines. You can’t escape the A.I. hype. But the stories in the pages ahead will deepen your understanding of a technology that may reshape our world. PLUS 62 THE QUEST FOR HUMAN-LEVEL A.I. BY JEREMY KAHN 76 TIKTOK: CHINA STARTS THE CLOCK ON A.I. BY EAMON BARRETT 83 MEDICINE BY MACHINE BY JENNIFER ALSEVER 86 SIRI, DID I ACE THE INTERVIEW? BY MARIA ASPAN…

WHEN A CANADIAN company called Deep Genomics announced in September that it had used artificial intelligence to solve a long-standing mystery about a genetic disorder called Wilson’s disease—and, what’s more, had used another deep-learning platform to identify a potential treatment—there was a flurry of excitement in the drug development world. The apparent milestone, which the company hailed as the “first-ever A.I.-discovered therapeutic candidate,” got echoing headlines from dozens of news outlets, and in January, the five-year-old startup received a $40 million endorsement in the form of a fresh round of venture capital funding. But the discovery itself is far more nuanced than most of the press reports have made it seem—and illustrates both the remarkable potential of A.I. in drug development and its inevitable limitations, at least in the…