Another “tops in tech” list has come out, and most of the names you’d expect to see are on it. What’s surprising, though, is that no one closely connected to Google made the top three; instead, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell were voted the most influential IT personalities.
Gates, Jobs, Dell Named Top IT Personalities
Mind you, I’m not saying that any high-ranking Googlers deserved to beat out those people – CompTIA’s poll was looking at the last 25 years, so Sergey, Larry, and the gang are latecomers. Still, it’s rare that one of these “best of” lists doesn’t have Google in first or second place.
Sergey and Larry did tie for fourth place, however, which put John Chambers in sixth. Larry Ellison nabbed seventh, and then another Google-related name appeared: Vint Cerf. (Although Cerf’s done much more than serve as Google’s “Chief Evangelist,” of course.)
To wrap up the list, ninth place went to Steve Ballmer, and Meg Whitman managed to get tenth. Except for a 20 percent gap between Jobs and Dell, most of the margins between these people were rather small.
And although this list is obviously subjective, we’ll go ahead and relay the standards by which it was created: “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,” according to CompTIA.
