Connectivity is perhaps the biggest opportunity of our time. As technology makes the world smaller, it’s clear that the countries and companies that connect the best — either in terms of, say, traditional infrastructure or through digital networks — are in the driver’s seat. Think about China’s lickety-split, high-speed-rail build-out, and how unfavorably the pace of our large public works projects compares. Or the economic and political leverage of Gazprom’s pipeline network, or the still early-stage power of Google. I’ve been thinking about the connectivity opportunity for a number of reasons lately, as you’ll see.
While our entire staff has been working like crazy creating this mega-issue of Fortune (more on that in a second), we’ve also been engaged in an even bigger project for you, and that is the launch of an entirely new Fortune.com. A little context here: Previously Fortune.com was part of a joint venture between CNN and Time Inc. (both of which had been divisions of Time Warner) called CNNMoney. Now that Time Inc. is being spun off from Time Warner, the joint venture has come to an end, and Fortune.com will be an independent website.
It is an understatement to say that we are totally juiced. The new Fortune.com is a dynamic business news website with a terrific interface that showcases a new level of depth of stories and scale, plus videos, graphics, and expanded magazine features, all honed by Fortune’s world-famous journalists and a new crop of recent hires brought onboard to greatly expand our coverage. It really is the best of both worlds: better access to the content you love and way more of it to boot. So please go to Fortune.com and tell a million of your best friends to do so too. I guarantee you will love it.
Now back to the latest print edition of our magazine, Fortune’s annual ranking of the nation’s largest 500 companies, which is remarkable for a number of reasons. It’s the 60th time we’ve created this ultimate barometer of business, and amazingly it marks the first time that the collective profits of the 500 exceed $1 trillion. (Wow!) It’s also the largest Fortune 500 in terms of pages that we have produced in nine years.
And getting back to my connectivity theme, I noticed many of the big winners on the list are connectors, like No. 5 Apple (tops in profit growth over the past decade — see Apple’s newest product: Complexity), No. 206 Kinder Morgan (see “The energy boom’s mighty middleman”), and No. 341 Facebook (whose earnings per share grew 5,900% last year). Of course, the Fortune 500 is even bigger and better on our new website, with pages and pages of compelling incremental content, like stories on the biggest stock gainers in the Fortune 500, the coolest jobs, and video of heroes of the Fortune 500.
So Fortune today is an awesome new website, a huge issue of the magazine, plus a high-powered series of conferences, like our upcoming Brainstorm Tech event in Aspen, July 14-16. That’s three vital and interconnected platforms, which afford us the opportunity to build out and make your whole experience greater than the sum of its parts. We hope you will continue to connect with us online, in the magazine, and at our live events as we look to bring you the very best in business.
This story is from the June 16, 2014 issue of Fortune.
