Consulting firm A.T. Kearney picked the best of the best from 2,500 companies worldwide. According to BusinessWeek, "Kearney then only considers those companies with 2008 sales greater than $10 billion, with at least 25% derived from outside their home region."

Here's how the top five looks:

5. Hyundai Heavy Industries (Shipbuilding)
4. Doosan Heavy Industries (Construction Products and Services)
3. Apple (Electronics)
2. Google (Internet Services)
1. Nintendo (Electronics)

Sony and Microsoft did not make the top forty.

The World's Best Companies [BusinessWeek Thanks Crito!] [Pic]

The titles selected for BusinessWeek Arcade had little to do with business, being a collection of seemingly random indie hits. Ian turns an eye towards the comment section, which expressed surprise at the collection:

The best part of this incongruous effort is the comments that call out its incongruity. One reader queries, "is this a desperate attempt to attract an audience? what does this have to do with covering business?" Another adds, "Why is BusinessWeek stooping to this sort of thing? A couple of months ago they had a blog about the best airport pickup sites and now this. Grow up and stick to the basics! If this is what I can expect from this website in the future then I'll have to reconsider my subscription." What's interesting about these comments is that they don't have anything particularly negative to say about games as a medium for entertainment, business, or journalism; they simply question the wisdom and relevance of including seemingly random, if quite lovely, independent games on a business magazine website.

He notes that the design of the BusinessWeek Arcade page implies something more than a "see also," but it hasn't been updated since its launch last March — was it (is it) a mere curiosity, or a "an openness to something more"?

BusinessWeek Arcade [Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project]

The news magazine never expected to be the subject of one of these games, however. Dazzling tale of Web 2.0 subversion and revenge follows the jump:

As it turns out, one designer, Mark "Messhof" Essen, didn't take too kindly to having his game, You Found The Grappling Hook, "freeloaded" without a link back to his site. So in a clever act of subversion, Messhof went ahead and swapped the game BusinessWeek was linking with a brand-new one, You Found The Grappling Hook (Pro).

As it turns out, the "Pro" version of the game is a thorough send-up of BusinessWeek itself, featuring the magazine's writers and stories; BusinessWeek's Helen Walters called it "intricate and frankly hilarious."

By the way, in an ironic twist, the BusinessWeek editors learned of their come-uppance from a Digg link to a Facebook page.

So, no hard feelings, but Walters said she's learned a little something from the experience:

Then there's the other classic Web 2.0/social networking lesson: fixing your mistakes. The name of the Facebook group says that we "freeloaded" the designer's work. Hand on heart, that wasn't our intention, but it does make me realize that we didn't include specific links to the sites of the designers we featured. And we should have done, so we're going to go back and add them.

We launched this Arcade to celebrate indie creativity, and one of those we set out to celebrate has lightly bitten us on the hand. Sir, despite our bleeding fingers, we salute you.

Subversion alert: BW Arcade in a state of (r)evolution [BusinessWeek]

The suits at Business Week sat down with chief fun-gineer Shigeru Miyamoto and designer Ken'ichiro Ashida to talk about how the Wii came to be. Contained within is some very interesting insight into the design process, the philosophy, and the alternate universe "Revolution" we could have been playing this holiday.

What was the previously the Wii? Well, it had a controller at one point based on a cellphone as well as a controller with a digital display device. (Let's hope they show these off at some point.)

And about that price:

Originally, I wanted a machine that would cost $100. My idea was to spend nothing on the console technology so all the money could be spent on improving the interface and software. If we hadn't used NAND flash memory [to store data such as games and photos] and other pricey parts, we might have succeeded.

But the biggest goal when making the Wii? Getting moms to buy it for their kids. Michael McWhertor

The Big Ideas Behind Nintendo's Wii [Business Week]