Future Shock If you thought the past 50 years were a time of radical change, you ain't seen nothin'. Futurist PETER SCHWARTZ fast-forwards to 2054 and gives us a preview of the top ten companies of the 100th FORTUNE 500.
By Peter Schwartz

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Who could have imagined in the mid-1950s all the wonders that have since come to pass? That scientists would decode the human genome, or clone a sheep? Or that we'd be carrying tiny phones that not only don't need wires but also can take photographs? Or that we'd be shopping from home in our underpants at 3 A.M. for little plastic discs with entire movies on them? As we celebrate a half-century of the FORTUNE 500, we decided to take a crack at how the next five decades will turn out. Or rather, we turned to a man who specializes in prognostication: Peter Schwartz. The former head of scenario planning for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and a script advisor on movies like Minority Report and Deep Impact, Schwartz and his colleagues at Global Business Network consult with clients ranging from FORTUNE 500 companies to the CIA on how the future might look. Here are his extremely educated guesses.

1. AMAZONBAY On the 100th FORTUNE 500, a retail company still tops the list. But what it means to be a retailer has completely changed. Companies like AmazonBay--the first 500 company to break $10 trillion in revenues--don't just sell things. No, these new retail powers meticulously create a highly personalized shopping experience for the consumer.

In the vastly wealthier and almost universally connected world of 2054, shopping is mostly virtual. (The strategy of luring shoppers into stores solely with low prices is passe.) People wirelessly make instant purchases of almost any scale--ranging from micropayments for information (like an address) to financing for a house. Need a new shirt and some groceries? Interface a tiny electronic device called an "information envelope" with a monitor in your home or office, and simply tell your digital shopper (DS) what you want. Like a cross between a butler and a personal accountant, your DS knows everything about you--your taste in clothes, your spending habits, even your financial prospects. It gives you choice when you want it and makes decisions when you don't. People can access their DS anytime, anywhere.

The businesses that run these networks are known as transaction envelope companies. And nearly everyone is a member of a TEC. AmazonBay, the first and largest, came into being when Amazon and eBay merged in 2015, then bought Ask Jeeves a few months later. Over the next few years AmazonBay bought a bank, a credit card company, and an insurance company to increase the services it could offer.

As this new retail model took off around 2020, other TECs began to form based on mergers of credit card providers and major retailers. (Bank of Wal-Martia and ProvidiPenney are among the second-tier players.) The TECs quickly realized that the battle for customers was multigenerational: The children of members would find it hard to leave their parents' TEC, since all their data from birth would be embedded in the system. Over the next decade all the TECs engaged in a furious race to lock in memberships. But AmazonBay was first and ended up by far the largest, with 1.8 billion members, mostly in Asia. And at AmazonBay, shipping is always free.

2. TOYOTA Flying cars are still not an option. But Toyotas continue to fly off the virtual lot half a century after the American and European markets appeared saturated. Why? Growing populations of young and newly affluent workers in Asia can finally afford them. Although the world population has stabilized at around eight billion, with each successive decade both India and China have seen 100 million people climb out of poverty and into the market for a car. After Toyota won the fuel-cell race early in the century, the Japanese automaker became the undisputed king of the car business. (Note: In 2024 the editors of Fortune, recognizing the huge economic and demographic shift toward Asia, made the Fortune 500 a single global list and moved the magazine's offices to Honolulu.) It was only a matter of time before GM and Ford evolved from manufacturers into the marketing and sales firms they are today.

Toyotas in 2054 resemble the cars of 2004--a passenger compartment, a separate engine compartment, and four wheels. But on and under the surface they are a whole different machine, one that's safer, more beautiful, more efficient, and much less polluting (part of the reason radical climate change was avoided). The surface is made of new materials like Ultraluminum--a woven combination of aluminum and smart-carbon nanotubes--that are extremely strong and light, absorb shock, and whose texture, color, pattern, and dynamics are all programmable. Driving the wheels of nearly all new cars are electric motors. They vary widely from fuel cells to turbogenerators, but all are more powerful than combustion engines.

The biggest change in driving, however, is the evolution of the smart car, combined with the smart highway. Big leaps in computing power have made possible an infrastructure that enables cars to interact with one another and their surroundings, making accidents much less likely. In fact, having a smart car and driving in EG (electronic guidance) lanes has become a prerequisite for life insurance.

3. SINOGAZZON The first fully integrated natural gas company--combining production, shipping, and distribution--came into being in 2025. That year Gazzon, the result of an earlier merger of Exxon and Gazprom, the Russian gas producer, bought the Chinese distributor Sinogaz. Right away Sinogazzon, based in Shanghai, was able to develop a dominant position in supplying the 1.5 billion Chinese who need fossil fuels to drive their cars, heat their homes, light their offices, and manufacture products for Earth's other seven billion inhabitants.

Oil production finally peaked in 2035 and began its decline in 2040. At that point hydrogen derived from natural gas began to replace gasoline, further expanding the gas market in China. Because of its market access and financial prowess, and the technological leadership Exxon had developed early in the century, Sinogazzon has been exceptionally successful in exploiting gas resources around the world, with huge gas projects in Australia, Qatar, and Antarctica.

4. SINOBIOCORP The revolution in molecular biology and genetics triggered a huge wave of innovative industries early in the 21st century. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, where people were squeamish about biohancement, Asia embraced the chance to improve on nature. Vast aging populations in China, India, and Japan created a market hungry for the cures of the new biology. So the new life-science giants grew mostly in Asia in drugs, agriculture, and bioindustrial processing. Playing in all three markets is the world market leader in life-science, Sinobiocorp, formed after a 2010 state-driven roll-up of Chinese biotech startups.

After losing its economic leadership role to Shanghai, Hong Kong has become China's center of pleasure and high-end living. Not surprisingly, Sinobiocorp and other companies have made Hong Kong the center for the most advanced health care in the world, with life extension the fastest-growing business. The maximum lifespan is headed toward 150. Sinobiocorp runs a chain of Rong Hua Long Life Spas, which provide services that include tissue regeneration to reverse aging, tissue realignment to change appearance, muscle development to add mass, and, it's rumored, complete cloning.

5. INDOSOFT Computers woke up in 2043. But revolutionary change in the software business began years earlier as the U.S. giants began to be dominated by their Indian talent. Over time the network of global Indian clans moved their center of action from the U.S. to India. So in 2020, when Microsoft and Oracle merged, it just seemed natural to change the name to Indosoft and move the headquarters to the new Gatestown complex in Mumbai. Though ever more of life is embedded in a matrix of software, software itself has proven resistant to large productivity improvements. The most demanding problem has been to maintain the many layers of programming that have been built on top of one another for decades. As a result, software remains a time-intensive business dependent on large numbers of smart, efficient workers.

But no longer necessarily human ones. Indosoft's latest generation of artificial-intelligence units (AIUs) are capable of improving their own programming and performance. Now the company's developers are beginning to wonder if they are at last at risk of putting themselves out of work. The company recently laid off thousands of low-level employees and transferred their jobs to virtual programmers--a phenomenon known as intelligence sourcing, or I-sourcing. As more intellectual activities are handed off to AIUs, the debate on I-sourcing is sure to heat up.

6. IBM Possibly the single most significant moment in business during the FORTUNE 500's second 50 years was the day in 2023 when IBM introduced the BohrBox, its first quantum hypercomputer for office use. The almost unimaginably large increases in memory derived from computing at the atomic level--bean-sized capsules of gas can hold trillions of times more information than antique hard drives--revolutionized the IT industry once again. Quantum computers enabled the solving of incredibly complex problems like climate forecasting, missile defense, and traffic management.

As the market leader, IBM has been the biggest beneficiary of the near-universal deployment of this technology. (In 2035, Big Blue solidified its dominance by buying HP, which had acquired Intel a decade earlier.) The ceaseless drive for productivity means that intelligent devices are now embedded in nearly everything and able to communicate with one another. Nearly all technology is accessible through voice recognition. Where once we had to use a keyboard and mouse, now we talk to our car, our home, and our office systems. Many of them anticipate our needs and act in advance.

In this new network marketplace, companies like IBM are driven by "bit fees." They charge a small fee for every bit of the unimaginably large amount of data manipulated and moved for their customers.

7. PATTELCO Communication technologies and the companies that deliver them help shape their eras. The telephone (Bell), television (RCA), the Internet (Cisco), and mobile phones (Nokia) all defined their moments in time. In 2054 the technology that is redefining our lives is telepresence, and the key company is Pattelco.

The Indian software giant, originally a software startup of the Patel clan, bought the remnants of AT&T in 2025 and incorporated the long-distance company's initials in its name when it launched the telepresence (TP) industry. As with telephones and PCs before them, nearly every room, public and private, at home and at work, is now equipped with telepresence devices. They are either wall-mounted displays or projection units that create the illusion of another location halfway around the world or just down the hall. TP makes virtual travel possible because of its ability to convey the experience of another location convincingly and for people at the other end to experience you as present.

Every telepresence device comes loaded with Pattelco's BeThere software as the standard operating system, creating vast licensing revenues for the Patel clan along with the stupendous flow of bit fees Pattelco gets for rendering all those lifelike images.

The Patel clan built its business plan around the old Microsoft model. That's why the BeThere operating system is constantly being upgraded. The current version is BeThere2050 v.3.0, and the hot new application is BeThere Interplanetary, which allows you walk around space bases on Mars, Titan, and the moon. The main demand, though, has come as a substitute for business travel. Security issues and a wave of new human viruses beginning in 2003 made air travel a real hassle. Telepresence, which didn't become widely accepted as a form of social interaction until around 2030, really took off with the Filipino Goat Flu pandemic of 2039.

8. NESTLE Once known for chocolates and baby formula, Nestle dominates nutriceuticals, the new class of foods that bridges the gap between agriculture and drugs. Europe remains the trendsetter in lifestyles, food, and fashion, and Nestle, the continent's largest company, got an early jump on the competition in the nutrifood biz by funding intensive anthropological research to better tailor its products to local cultures in the emerging world.

Nestle focuses on the biology of healthy people rather than sick ones, and that's reflected in its mission statement: "Making well people even better." For example, its famous line of Smarties chocolates now contains stem-cell memory boosters. The new Lean & Clean Cuisine frozen meals are programmed to automatically lower cholesterol and dissolve trans fats. Nestle has also revamped its cosmeceutical division. Its L'Ore-All brand features a lipstick that provides the recommended daily dose of 100 vitamins and minerals.

9. NANOBOTIX Just as the invention of production plants powered first with steam and then with electricity drove the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, so is nanotechnology driving a whole new revolution in the middle part of the 21st century. A product of the first wave of consolidation in nanotechnology startups, Nanobotix, in Palo Alto, has been the pioneer in manufacturing on the atomic scale. Its scientists first cracked the code on how complex molecules in natural systems form more complex structures--such as proteins that become full-sized human beings--then began applying what they learned by "programming" molecules to create electronic devices. By 2030 more and more sophisticated devices were built from the atom up.

While steel, cement, and other commodities are still made in giant factories, almost all high-tech devices are produced using nanoconstruction methods. Instead of large centralized factories, digital products are put together locally inside MRI-sized machines by programmed molecules, or "nano-assemblers." In 2042, Nanobotix introduced its most advanced product, the desktop factory. It resembles an early laser printer, but in the front it has a transparent cylinder where the user can see the object being manufactured come into being as the nanoassemblers do their work. With a supply of natural gas, a few trace chemicals, and a download of software, it is now possible to produce, say, a telepresence starter console for the kids overnight in your home office.

10. NEWS CORP. People want to be informed and entertained in greater numbers than ever before. And after holding back the tide of digital distribution for nearly two decades, News Corp. switched direction in 2010 and led the trend of making all types of media available on demand--movies, newspapers, magazines, books, music. The fight among advertisers over consumers' attention--or "A-time," to use the latest marketing buzzword--is fiercer than ever.

Much more than its rivals TimeDisney (owner of FORTUNE's parent) and ViaComcast, News Corp. has created innovative new services to capture that A-time. For instance, the hottest new thing in ubiquicasting is the company's media-telepresence (MTP) service. For a substantial bit fee, anyone can be a sports hero or movie star or live out any other dream--advanced computer technology virtually embeds a person in the event. MTP is expensive--these services tax even the fastest quantum computers--but incredibly popular and profitable. But the company's biggest business by far is the ownership of sports teams and their distribution rights all over the world in nearly every sport.

Amazingly, Rupert Murdoch, who became the first person to download himself into a quantum computer, is still the most powerful media magnate in the world. The News Corp. CEO spent the last ten years of his life entering everything he had ever known and as much of his persona as he could into a state-of-the-art IBM 2.4 petabyte quantum bubble array. When his body finally left this world in 2027 at age 96, a virtual Murdoch awakened. Insiders say the new chief executive is now, if possible, even more of a force to be reckoned with for one simple reason: He never sleeps.