Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation has a gem of a column this week on what he calls "five guys": Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google). "Theirs is by no means the only narrative of our times, but it is certainly one of the more hopeful ones," he writes.
The column itself falls into the tendency to think about companies as the products of individuals rather than teams, and to focus on the founders rather than the executors (Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt) or the system that made it possible. But it's a gem of a column.