The co-founders of two of the world’s most successful and recognizable information technology (IT) companies are the industry’s most influential personalities of the past 25 years, according to a poll by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corporation, claimed the top spot on the most influential list. Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, was named by 84 percent of the 473 IT industry professionals who participated in the web-based poll.
MacDailyNews Take: 99% of whom hold MS certificates and incorrectly think they can’t live without MS products. And, shouldn’t you actually have to have a personality to get on a list of personalities, much less top the thing? Still, casting the world into a decades-long Dark Ages of Personal Computing certainly is influential.
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, placed second on the list of most influential IT person of the past 25 years. Jobs was selected by 73 percent of voters.
MacDailyNews Take: All the more remarkable because 99% of them hold MS certificates, incorrectly think they can’t live without MS products, and think Mac is the name of the guy three cubicles over.
Placing third was Michael Dell, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Dell, the company he founded in 1984. He was named by 53 percent of voters.
MacDailyNews Take: 99% of whom were high on hash.
Tied for fourth, at 47 percent, was Linus Torvalds. As a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Torvalds wrote the original code for the operating system known as Linux. Also at 47 percent were Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who, as Stanford University Ph.D. students, founded Google in 1998.
Rounding out the top ten in the CompTIA poll on the most influential IT industry personalities of the past 25 years were:
• John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems (44 percent)
• Larry Ellison, CEO and member of the board of directors of Oracle (36 percent)
• Vinton Cerf, widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet” and the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet (35 percent)
• Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft (35 percent)
MacDailyNews Take: Should’ve been higher. Ballmer influenced plenty of budding IT Pros to select their campus housing and dorm-mates very carefully; also taught them how to dance, scream, throw chairs, and — in an example of influencing by doing the opposite — to copiously apply antiperspirant.
• Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay since 1998 (30 percent)
The poll was conducted in conjunction with CompTIAs 25th anniversary. The majority of poll respondents (91 percent) have worked in the IT industry for at least three years; and two-thirds have been in the industry for five years or more.
More info about the poll here.
MacDailyNews Take: The usual travesty. The fact is that today we all use Macs, whether they’re derivative, inferior, upside-down and backwards copies as seen with Windows PCs; or any number of Linux distros that have sadly resorted to trying to look/act like Windows (doubly-derivative); or the real thing. It’s plainly obvious to anyone with even a smidgen of perspective (which is why a bunch of IT Guys blew it): Steve Jobs is far and away the most influential IT personality of the past 25 years. The vast majority of over a billion PCs on the planet work the way they do because of Steve Jobs, not Bill Gates. And that’s without even mentioning how Jobs remade the music industry, led the company that changed animation forever, and is in the process of bringing the world the next new UI paradigm: multi-touch.
Naming Bill Gates “Most Influential IT Industry Personality” over Steve Jobs is akin to naming Harry Connick Jr. “Most Influential Male Singer of Pop Standards” over Frank Sinatra.
[Updated: 7:45pm EST: Added final Take.]
And rightfully so. Bill showed us what not to do, and Steve shows us what to do. Both big influences.
Bill G had NEGATIVE influence, so the pool is correct, just doesn’t say what kind of influence
Several of those inductees belong on top of poles.
(And I don’t mean Lech Kaczyński.)
The big difference between the two is (using a hockey analogy) that Bill Gates skates to where the puck is now and Steve Jobs skates to where the puck WILL be in the future.
Note to Bill Gates: The future isn’t hard to predict when it’s in the past.
To be honest, Bill did affect things a lot. I mean, do you really think the computing landscape would look the same if Apple had continued to be dominant with no real competition?
@ B. Gates
Exactly. Steve Ballmer was also a big influence, Microsoft wouldn’t be the same without him.
@ B. Gates
@ S. Ballmer
Guys, don’t forget Michael Dell. He popularized and cheapened low-end PC’s, which is what most people use! If it weren’t for him people would still be using expensive, high-end machines for everything and the computer wouldn’t be nearly as accessible! They would still be all elitist like Macs!
NO!!!! I would have thought that Jay Miner, inventor of the Amiga computer would have deserved that honor. Huh, well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates huh?
wow and ouch
no Tim Berners-Lee? inventor of the web?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/2004-04-15-www-inventor-prize_x.htm
@bizarro, wasn’t that Al Gore? (no I’m not starting a political debate, just joking around….)
No Ted Waitt or Wayne Inouye or Rob Glaser or Ed Colligan?
WHAT?
Hey! Bizaro Ballmer, you surely meant Al Gore right?
“no Tim Berners-Lee? inventor of the web?”
Ah, but he did it on a NeXt cube, which was invented by a company run by Steve Jobs!
Al Gore only invented the internet, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. But Steve Jobs invented the computer he used to do it, so in a way Steve Jobs invented the World Wide Web by proxy.
Once again the 12 year olds running MDN seem to feel obligated to put in their “witty” comments bashing anything related to Microsoft or Dell. Maybe someday when your sack drops you’ll be able to relax and enjoy Apple for the good products they produce without blindly lashing out at everything that could possibly construed as complimentary towards other companies.
Based on what I’ve seen over the years, Bill Gates has been heavily influenced by Steve Jobs.
Mmm….positive influence.. or negative influence?
They each top one of those. And Bill gets the wooden spoon.
Pretty random poll. I’m glad that Steve Jobs was high up on the list, but Michael Dell 3? And why would Torvalds be 4, with no mention of Stallman, who was more responsible for Linux (and the whole free software movement) than Torvalds?
I think the guys at Xerox Parc probably deserve the number one spot.
Michael Dell has influenced millions of employers that price is the most important consideration when choosing computer technology.
Bill Gates influenced millions of IT employees to tolerate the crap OS technology their employers bought for the company in the interest of their own job security.
Steve Jobs is influencing more and more consumers that you get what you pay for and that there is an elegant, secure, easy to use, viable alternative to computing hell; it’s called a Mac.
Peace.
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Olmecmystic
the MDN snarky/insightful comments are Golden, they’re a third of the reason I bookmarked macdailynews.com, the other two reasons are.. I might actually learn some tech news, and the snarky/insightful and occasionally stupid comments from readers.
You can not ignore the influence of Bill Gates and Microsoft. Face it, most of the computers in the world run Microsoft OS’s. It is only in recent years that Apple has started making a dent in the personal computer world. MDN can make all the silly “takes” they want, but it doesn’t change the facts.
Well I think it’s a shame Tim Berners-Lee isn’t in this list. He should be higher up than Gates too. Gates opposed the WWW and tried to compete with it using MSN. A proprietary M$ alternative to the web. Now turned into a poxy website and messenger server/client setup. I guess Berners-Lee inventing something as insignificant as the WWW is pretty un-influential. Maybe it’s because he’s English. Oh well what a shame.
Mind you we are talking about mindless IT automatons from the Microsoft collective aren’t we?
Oh my god. Did you read the report.
Here’s a bit that showed how bad these IT nerds are brainwashed by M$ :
“Respondents then selected products, applications, and technologies that they
believed to be among the top ten most influential in the IT industry over the past 25
years.
o Sixty-six percent (66%) chose Internet explorer as the most influential.
o Fifty-six percent (56%) selected Microsoft Word.
o One-half of respondents (50%) selected Microsoft Windows 95.
o Microsoft Excel and the Apple iPod were each selected by forty-nine percent
(49%) of respondents. “
Internet Exploiter is the sole reason why I have decided to give up professional web design after 10 years of hard graft and learning XHTML, PHP, CSS etc etc. Why? because it creates way too much stress and wankers like these guys insist their companies stick with IE6 aaarrrggghhh!!!
Word also drives me mad but I can live with it.
Windows 95 was shit. These people are so brainwashed into believing M$ is the only company they will ever need to supply them with things it’s sad.
We need a revolution in the IT world. CEOs and Managing directors throughout the world need to be educated in the fact that their companies will be better off without M$ products and the blood sucking IT departments that they pour money into to keep this shit running.
Sorry about the rant but it’s been a hard day!!!
@ Norm
Many have great ideas… Acting on them and implementing them is where the work and the kudos are.
@British Mac Head
I was going to inquire what a wanker was.
But the web and wikipedia supplied more than i wished to know.
lol
Very appropriate for many, but certainly not all MS IT denizens of server alleys.