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Comment by hashbig | Hacker News Reader

I unfollowed him after he tweeted that Repl.it is the most innovative company in the world.

Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.

We had a startup called Runnable in 2013 that did a similar thing as repl.it. Coding sandboxes in many languages by spinning up docker containers on the backend [1]. We solved a lot of scaling problems, but I honestly thought the innovation was mostly handled by docker. And that was by 2013.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140702013410/http://runnable.co...

Pfizer doesn't really belong in that list. They applied money to an already made invention and scaled up an existing manufacturing process along with a dozen other companies. Pfizer is not even the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine, nor is it the first manufacturer to express interest, nor did it take any risk.

I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.

I can totally understand why Alphabet is on the list, but what is your reason for regarding Samsung as the most innovative company? Nowadays I've found them struggling to compete with their Chinese and Taiwanese opponents.

Purely in the phone division, they are not that innovative. But they have their fingers in a lot of pies, and are still #2 in semiconductors, they innovate a lot in display technology, they have their own processors, Samsung Pay was pretty huge and still has a serious impact, they are one of the big lithium ion battery companies, the S-Pen also was really huge for mobile devices in general, their foldable screens have a lot of potential.

Another really big thing is that Samsung funds a lot of basic research also at the university level, which AFAIK none of the big tech companies do.

Are you referring to Pfizer because of the mRNA-vaccine? That has actually been invented by the German biotech startup BioNTech ;-)

The manufactoring at Pfizer is pretty impressive.

It is impressive, but it comes from capital and not innovation. Pfizer is not the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine.

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