[jfdimark]

I would argue that theirs was not a stellar year, and imho their momentum stalled relative to other tech giants.

So hence they ended up in the 'losers' column.

Of course that doesn't mean they had quite as terrible year as some in the list...but for ease of reference it's a binary list rather than a gradient.

[xapata]

When I read an analysis paper, I find it more convincing if the dependant variable is continuous rather than binary. It's too easy to find spurious statistical "significance" otherwise. The heuristic holds up here as well.