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Gates, Jobs, Torvalds: Who is Most Important?
Ian Wilson writes "silicon.com has launched its latest Agenda Setters poll which puts together a list of the top 50 people influencing tech. I remember Slashdot carried last year's poll - which was won by Steve Jobs. The full top 50 includes many of the usual suspects. Last year's winner Steve Jobs has slipped down to second place, but perhaps most interesting is the fact that the panel of judges couldn't separate Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates - they are tied in seventh place."
... the most interesting thing is that #1 is a guy from the BBC. As they look to digitise their content, the BBC is carving itself a really nice niche on the Web -- a World Service for the 21 century.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
it makes some sense i think. The big battles right now are in corporate IT, where microsoft and gnu/linux are taking big bites out of commercial unix platforms in terms of installation base and spending. So, the two are one in terms of big things on the horizon.
The real question is, what happens when Microsoft and companies like Suse, redhat, and even IBM start competing head to head -- what's going to happen then?
~dijjnn
To do my bit for pseudo-democracy worldwide, I tried to vote; when I did, though, I was asked to vote again. And again... wonder did my vote count at all. Damn, it's just like living in Florida.
To commit heresy, though: should Linus be that high on the list? Sure, he's influential in linux, and linux should be represented, but in the happy world of IT shouldn't some Red Hat or Suse guy be higher?
In case you care, I voted for Hu Jintao. I don't share the judges' belief that vendors will dominate in China, and I reckon that Hu could well in years to come cause geeks much angst as they support his open source policies while being less fond of his oppression policies.
http://www.siliconagendasetters.com/technologists. htm
Say what is Bill Gates doing in that list? He didn't know DNS was an acronym already in use on the Net, he doesn't know much of the technical aspects of his own product... What gives? How can we trust this list?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Granted, they may not be as high as a lot of the other people on the list, but they should be on it. How many other companies are having as big of an impact on the Internet as Google? Not many.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Why would it be Linus? How does controlling the direction of the Linux kernel possible make him the most influential person in tech?
If David Blunkett has his way then days of GATTACA aren't far away and then we will need one too many Vincent to democratize the system. Its really Scary.
And of course, it won't be by a government who were just a little economical with the truth over Iraq.
You simply could not be more wrong in your statement. If it weren't for Linus, the OSS movement would now stick to a free OS based either on 386BSD or GNU/Hurd - or some combination of these. Everything would look pretty similar to the real world as we know it.
Bill's case is far from obvious - if it wasn't him in particular, his place would be most likely taken by Gary Kildall. The history of personal computing would look entirely different, as Kildall was far from being a monopolist egomaniac like Gates and Ballmer. Kildall's company, Digital Research, could easily be the Microsoft of the 8-bit computers. Their system was just _the_ system for 8-bit machines, but Kildall did not try to use his advantage as a vehicle for building monopolist empire. Quite contrary, he was sticking to the principle that the company that makes OS should not take part in the application market. That's actually how Microsoft has found its niche - as a key vendor of the CP/M applications. So if it wasn't Bill, CP/M-86 would be the MS-DOS, and GEM Desktop would be Microsoft Windows - but there would be NO equivalent of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office, and that would be probably good news (we would have various competing office suites instead).
The case of Steve Jobs is even more obvious - Apple with Steve and Apple without Steve (1985-1997) are just different companies. No Steve - no iPod. Period.
Torvalds = Wrote a world class operating system from scratch ..meh..
He didn't write the whole operating system, he just wrote some of the kernel; to say he wrote the whole thing is disrespectful to the thousands of other people who have contributed.
Rather, when they abuse them.
From what I read of the article (just as the /.ing began...) its about influence, good OR bad. Keeping this in mind, BGates has certainly created influence in the industry. His draconian licensing terms has created a bigger interest in GPL and BSD licensing (and others). His insistance on a closed software model has created more interest in open source projects like Apache.
He did make it affordable to get a useable computer on mom's desktop, and easier to get it infected. Some of the most ingenious programming *IS* viruses and trojans, which Windows has provided a viable platform to run on. Try writing your own smtp server and remote control server, all in a few K of space, from scratch. Not child's play.
I don't mean to bash him, not everything he has done is bad. You don't become the most successful software company by doing everything wrong, after all. But he IS one of the most influential persons in the industry, if for no other reason than his methods inspiring others to provide an alternative to his products.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Planned downtime my ass, silicon.com just had a tech who luckily spotted the /. about to be laid on his server. They can run this time, but they can't hide forever.
>Mostly because if Gates died tomorrow, it would affect the economy a lot more than if Linus died tomorrow.
I disagree with that assertion. The man who
has been at the helm of Microsoft, Inc. since
2000 has been Steve Ballmer. Gates could get
hit by a bus tomorrow, and Microsoft, Inc.
would continue business as usual, using
their standard (rude) business practices
without so much as a gasp.
Torvalds on the other hand inspired a movement,
and (in my awfully naive opinion) gave the
FSF the credibility and recognition it needed
in the wider computing community that was ignorant of the GPL and the quality of
software that comes out of FSF.
If Torvalds were hit by a bus tomorrow,
Linux would continue, but the leadership
of the Linux kernel folks would be something
more like FreeBSD, where a consensus was required, since no single individual stood
out as the heir apparent. (My personal
favorite would be Alan Cox, but that's just
my personal favorite.)
So the question is... who are these people? Am I just a clueless idiot, or are 37 of the most influential 50 people completely anonymous? They could be names out of a hat as far as I know.
# 1. Ashley Highfield
# 3. Niklas Zennstrom
# 5. David Blunkett
# 6. Richard Granger
# 9. Eric Schmidt
# 10. Marc Benioff
# 11. Sir Peter Gershon
# 12. Marten Mickos
# 13. Meg Whitman
# 14. Sir David Tweedie
# 15. Jonathan Ive
# 16. James Murdoch
# 17. Arun Sarin
# 19. Sven Jaschan
# 20. S Ramadorai
# 21. Karen Price
# 25. Joe McGeehan
# 26. Vivek Paul
# 28. Eric Abensur
# 29. Martin Varsavsky
# 31. Len Hynds
# 32. David Levin
# 33. John Connors
# 35. Azim Premji
# 36. Ben Verwaayen
# 37. Daniel Egger
# 38. Van Honeycutt
# 39. Jon Rubinstein
# 40. Mark J Cox
# 41. Hu Jintao
# 42. Dan'l Lewin
# 45. Ratan Tata
# 46. Michael Powell
# 47. David Sainsbury
# 48. Andy Duncan
# 49. Bernard C Soriano
# 50. Simon Davies
I only recognized 13 of the 50, and I work in IT, read "InformationWeek" and other junk like that for the sole purpose of trying to stay on top of this kind of thing.
# 2. Steve Jobs
# 4. Tom Ridge
# 7. Linus Torvalds
# 7. Bill Gates
# 18. Rupert Murdoch
# 22. Lawrence Lessig
# 23. Ian Foster
# 24. Jonathan Schwartz
# 27. Sam Palmisano
# 30. Donald E Knuth
# 34. Michael Dell
# 43. Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley
# 44. Richard Stallman
MORTAR COMBAT!
This story is just reattributed to Vlad. It was originally a story about Hatto II of Mainz, who was Archbishop there between 968 and 970 (those dates are provable facts). He also was said to have invited all poor in his diocesy to a huge meal, and he also commanded the doors to be closed and the hall to be burned down.
But when the hall sunk to ashes, a big tribe of mice broke out of the ruins and started to hunt Archbishop Hatto. He tried to have the mice squashed, killed, blocked, nothing helped. So he fled out of Mainz down the Rhine. Near the town of Bingen he asked a ferryman to row him over to a small island with a fortified tower built on it. He ran into the tower and blocked the door. But the mice, being millions of them, were swimming through the waters of the Rhine, reaching the island, entering the tower and eating Archbishop Hatto.
The tower at the island near Bingen can still be visited, it's called the Maeuseturm (lit.: Mice Tower) since then. For further references check a short descripton of the site. Other sources attribute the story to Archbishop Hatto I, a predecessor of Hatto II.
Look at number 5 - David Blunkett. This man makes all other (previously thought to be totalitarian) Home Secretaries in the UK look positively liberal.
This is scary for those of us in the US too, because the UK is basically a beta test site for totalitarianism in the US. This will continue to be the case for as long as George W. Bushoco and his lapdog Tony Blair remain in power in their respective nations.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Linus Torvalds makes a convenient representational symbol for the Linux community (it's named after him, after all), but is he really an Agenda Setter?
And, truthfully, Linux is the architect of the Linux *kernel*, which is stable and reliable and all of that, but it's a very small part of the Linux user experience. Actually, it's an insignificant part of the Linux user experience. If the Linux kernel were replaced with, say, BSD, then what impact would that have on someone who spends all of his time in the KDE desktop? This is not to belittle Linus's achievement, but at some point who matters more: the guy who builds guitars or the people who use those guitars to make amazing music? It's not like people say "Oh, my favorite band XXX is so completely enabled by the man who invented the electric guitar."
In the US, while the airlines will tell you to provide a picture ID to get a boarding pass, they won't actually tell you the law that requires this. WTF? The government can't publish a law requiring people to show a picture ID? They say it classified. How the hell can you expect people to obey a classified law?
Most likely, they know the law is illiegal and would be struck down by the courts so they just try to BS people into following their wishes.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Then, to my mind, this means Linus, Alan, Richard, Manuel and all the others need to be paraded on Oprah, IBM commercials, and more. Have ANY of these been shown as Geek of the Week?
Instead of much of the reality TV bullshit, we need the 5-minute spot of Linux and F/LOSS personalities to be rotated. Not just Linus, tho, but ALL the major voices from the foreground to the average code contributor.
Surely, some will want to lay low for employment reasons, but others who have contributed code could as well be in a Freedom Hall of Fame. By corollary, ms' henchmen/women could be in the Encroachment Hall of Shame.
It would be nice if IBM would sponsore these commercials. I haven't watched much "live" TV, opting for eye-selected DVDs from the local import video shop, but is IBM doing anything lately. I did in the past 2 weeks look at the list
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/tvads/
of commercials IBM ran, but didn't see anything doing "The Average Freedom Lover".
Actually, putting a little cup o' tea in their hands in some tiny French cups, with Mandrake on one side of the table, and tall Lipton on the Red Hat side, with Novell & SUSE sporting Ginseng and a lager, we might get some serious laughs at microshaft's (lower-casing/deprecation of microsoft's name intentional/perpetual with me...) expense. But, it would take IBM's money to make sure the ads ran, or ms' marketing department would preempt all the ads slots...
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Actually, from direct personal experience, the biggest problem with massive and centralised databases isn't malicious abuse. Rather, it's old-fashioned operator error, but now of the "one wrong number typed and someone's life gets turned upside down for months" kind.
Unfortunately, there is often an implicit culture of denial: the database is "almost perfect", so the procedures for fixing the effects of imperfections are rarely fully thought through, and often far more time-consuming and error-prone than they should be.
FWIW, I was over-taxed by several hundred pounds after someone at a tax office mistyped my National Insurance number (for our US friends: like a SSN, but in the UK) by one character, and inadvertently merged me with someone on the far side of the country. The scary part wasn't so much that I lost some money for a while, but that the first time I knew about it was when my pay-cheque turned up short and I queried it with my employer's accountant; no-one thought to check with me that my status really had changed. Worse, it took three months chasing numerous tax officials and accountants in several offices to get it fixed, because they didn't believe I existed -- the linked computer records had automatically messed up all my identifying information and confused it with the other guy's.
If that could happen to me a couple of years ago, think what's going to happen when your whole life -- medical records, benefits payments, criminal record and "unofficial" black marks, etc. -- are all tied in to the uebersystem, and then that same human in that same office has to type the same hundreds of nine-digit codes perfectly every day.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How about ushering in some morality? I forget, business and morality don't mix.
If morality and business don't mix, then companies should just quit donating and doing charitable things.
Just this past Friday evening someone tried to assail my anti-ms stance with this weak argument:
"Do you know how many millionairs bill gates made? Do you know of ANY other company or person who donated as much as microsoft or bill gates?"
My standard argument response is: "If my parents donated $10 million to every county in the US and $1 million to every STATE in the US, but they were found connected to a string of animal slayings, child pornography or destruction of peoples's lives, should they be allowed to get off the hook, just because they give a shitload of money? Do YOU know how many companies ms fudded out of existence, still-birthed startups that tried to offer better and fairly-competing alternatives? Do you KNOW that a corporation company is accorded the status of PERSON, and that if a PERSON did to another what bill gates and henchmen/henchwomen did and still do to COMPANIES that would be called corporate murder, PEOPLE would go to jail?"
So, I'd say for morality and good-man points, Linus is more than head and shoulders above gates. I don't give a damn how much money he gives. The big question is: Can those donees take those computers and strip them of windoze and install Linux on them? Can they MIX those environments. Are they pre-conditioned before acceptance of the goods that they are receiving them contingent upon not using, testing, or talking about Linux, Open Source or even weighing in on behalf of any studies?
As for the argument that Linux is costing job, BULLSHIT. CEOs decide they can't cut their own compensation and instead whack salaries, rather than rewrite their staunchly widget-based sales model. If they adjust the model to charge for support, integration, testing, and such, and reduce the software cost to the cost of shipping, rather than fixing development to disks shipped or code delivered, then they could still exist. It also would force them to stop using PAYING customers and users as beta sites.
But, some of them still don't get it. They probaby won't ever, either.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Why?
Steve introduced a general "cool" factor to computers that seems to get normal people interested in computers instead of thinking they're only for geeks. On the other end of the spectrum, Linus introduced an OS that would bring out some of the best in geeks. That leaves us with little ol' Bill, who's creations drive away geeks AND normal people. I think the only reason Bill made the list is because of his fat wallet.
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
I do not agree. Mr. Gates is _the_ most influential guy in the business. There are few on the list that he could not take out of business should choose to do so. He could easely kill Apple (M$ even owns part of it) skype or kazaa could be build into windows anytime and who would then download the independent programs if a network of all windows users were readily availble?
...
M$ does not innovate. Thats not their business. Their business is to make money. So they wait and see which applications are successfull, and voila if they are free on the net, they appear in windows for free too (ie, mediaplayer, firewall)
On the other hand, if there is a market where all competitors charge, they simply make a compeeting product (usually simpler) and make it easy to use. (sql server, office)
So they have success. Not only through being a monopoly but also through analysing their competitors and trying to see how they can improve their programs, and how they can make them simpler so that ordinary people can use them. - Something Linux, Oracle, IBM and so on could learn a lot from.
Also, M$ has a mantra of making it easy for the developers to make programs for their platform. Consider VB and dotnet. Especially VB really sucks from a computer science perspective, but it really have enabled a lot more people to produce programs than for example c has. (or at least it is a lot easier). And this is one of the reasons why M$ won windows vs. os/2. They gave away their developers kits, while IBM charged $20000 a piece. Guess where the garage developers of the early 90's put their developing efforts? And have you noticed how there is a lot of code examples and documentation for dotnet and vb on the net, while oracle and ibm has almost none?
So to recap.
1) m$ enter platform
2) m$ makes it easy to program for their platform
3) a lot of companies makes a lot of programs for m$'s platform
4) m$ picks the winners of 3) and buys them or hires their best developers and makes a competing product, preferably bundling it with other m$ products for a synergy effect, and definetly making it easier to use.
5) profit (a lot)
6) Bill Gates is the world richest man, and quite more powerfull than the top 50 it people.
Phew, that was a lot. Thank you for reaching the bottom.
Now, consider what you would do if you have any power over Linux, Symbian, IBM, SAP or any other company with a platform worth defending. I don't think they are doing very well. And I simply cannot believe how stupid the execs of the above companies are.
Why funny? SCO have certainly been influential this year, if not necessarily for the better.
Yes, Microsoft is great blab blab blab.. But realistically what makes bill gates more important than the guy that runs the coders in the bacement ? really has bill gates actually coded anything at all in the last 20years? has he ever written any code.. If so was it any good?
Bill gates has got some good business sense if somewhat unethical to many people. But the tallents of people are on different planes so putting them in a tie is a little daft in my opinion.
About 10-15%, the majority from the Old Testament, but some from the New. I admit that's not very much, but I make a point of understanding what I read, and I think I'm generally familar with the most of the rest. Having reread my post, I don't want people to take my criticisms too harshly. Different people can draw very different lessons from the Bible, you should always read things for yourself. However, I found that God in the Old Testament was not very good at all, and Satan was somewhat of an enigma. A lot like George W. Bush and Osama, really.
That last sentence was just for the flamebait mod (which my other post somehow avoided).
In Soviet America the banks rob you!