It doesn’t take long to walk from Siemens’s old headquarters in Munich to its new one: the German industrial conglomerate has built it right next door. The design is cutting-edge, as are the building’s environmental features. It is packed with energy-saving sensors; channelled rainwater is used to flush the toilets. General Electric, Siemens’s big American rival, will soon have a new base, too. Its building will also boast plenty of green technology, such as a huge canopy made of solar panels.

The two industrial giants aren’t so much showing off as signaling transformation. Both firms are going through the most profound change in their corporate histories, attempting to switch from being makers of machines into fully digital businesses.

It is tempting to bracket the firms together for other reasons, too. Siemens, in contrast, excels in product design and factory automation. It already has experience in digitising the entire life cycle of an industrial product, from design to fabrication, so it is in some ways already more of an IT firm than GE.

It is no surprise, then, that the two firms are also taking very different paths towards digitization. GE is completely reinventing itself, whereas Siemens is staying close to its roots. What works best will be closely watched by other companies in all sorts of industries. They want to know what happens when operating technology, as represented by GE and Siemens, properly meets information technology.

GE’s answer has been to invest billions since 2011 in a data platform called Predix. It wants the system to become for machines what Android is for smartphones. Siemens’s digital transformation appears to be going more slowly. Only recently did it begin marketing MindSphere, its equivalent to Predix, more intensively.

Siemens’s attitude to its industrial customers’ data may also work better than GE’s. Whereas individual consumers are by and large willing to give up personal information to one platform, such as Google or Facebook, most companies try to avoid such lock-in. Whether they are makers of machine tools or operators of a factory, they jealously guard their data because they know how much they are worth. Both GE and Siemens say their customers will keep control of their data in the new digitized world of their data in the new is who will own the algorithms that are generated using these data. GE claims ownership; Siemens is much less categorical.

It is thus unlikely that a single platform will come to dominate the industrial Internet. Nonetheless GE seems better prepared for a digital future. The firm now has a flexible organization that can change course quickly. Siemens, by contrast, is still living in a more closed vertical world. Both new headquarters feature small museums displaying the firms’ roots. No prize for guessing which one you can visit strictly by appointment only.

The word “categorical” (Para. 6) most probably means________.