“As CNBC celebrates its 25th anniversary, we’re trying to come up with a list of the 25 most influential leaders of the past quarter century. We started with a list of 200 and asked readers to narrow it down to 25,” Evelyn Cheng reports for CNBC. “Technology leaders actually take half of the top 10 spots in the current poll results, which MIT professor and futurist Erik Brynjolfsson said is right on the money. ‘In terms of transforming society, the big, big story is technology. That’s the big story of our generation. You want the list to reflect it,’ he said in a phone interview…. ‘I would be comfortable with as many as a dozen or 15 people (from technology) on the list,’ he said.”
“Apple founder Steve Jobs tops CNBC’s poll, followed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The next tech name on the list is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, followed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys — Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt,” Cheng reports. “Brynjolfsson said he doesn’t think Gates should be on the list. Gates ‘did most of his work before 1989,’ Brynjolfsson said.”
“Inevitably, with a limit of 200 contenders across the board, some names didn’t make the list. So who did CNBC leave out? An overwhelming favorite is Tim Berners-Lee, who, with apologies to Al Gore, created the World Wide Web in 1989,” Cheng reports. “Despite all the major technological advances of the past 25 years from personal computing to the Internet, Brynjolfsson said you haven’t seen anything yet. ‘This is the second machine age. I hope that people appreciate the fact that we are just in the early stages,’ he said. ‘The first disruption was in the last 25 years. That was just a warm-up stage, a tidal wave that’s just getting under way.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Cast your votes (for up to 25 people) here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]