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Revealed: Tech titans of the past 25 years

A survey organised by industry body CompTIA, which receives financial support from Microsoft, has voted Bill Gates as the most influential person in technology
By Andrew Donoghue, Contributor
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The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a 25-year-old trade body that certifies IT professionals and is funded by major vendors, including Microsoft, has released a poll that claims that Bill Gates is most influential person in tech.

The survey asked IT industry professionals to vote on the most influential personalities in the IT industry during the past 25 years. According to the web-based poll, released late last week, Gates was named by 84 percent of the 473 professionals who participated.

However, CompTIA made no reference to whether Gates's influence had been positive or negative in the main.

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Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, was selected by 73 percent of voters, according to CompTIA.

Jobs and Apple are enjoying a fantastic run of form at the moment, driven primarily by the success of the iPod. But things haven't always gone his way. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors, he resigned from Apple in 1985. He eventually returned in 1997 following the acquisition by Apple of Next, another company Jobs had founded.

Jobs's powers of persuasion are sometimes referred to as his "reality distortion field".

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Michael Dell, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive of Dell — the company he founded in 1984 — came in at third place, with 53 percent of voters.

However, 2007 has not been Dell's (the company and the man) best year. In February, the company announced that Kevin Rollins had resigned as chief executive officer, and Dell had retaken the helm of the PC company.

Rollins' departure comes after a terrible year for the company, during which it lost its lead in PC market share to HP and an investigation by the SEC for possible accounting improprieties began. Several executives have left the company in recent months, including chief financial officer Jim Schneider, who was slated to leave the company at the end of January.

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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.

Microsoft and CompTIA have traditionally been closely aligned, particularly in the effort against open-source software — both are key members of the Initiative for Software Choice, which frequently takes an anti-open-source stance. Earlier this year, CompTIA threw its weight behind Microsoft in Redmond's fight against an European Commission report, which allegedly favoured open-source software.

On another occasion, when the Commission fined Microsoft last year for not sharing protocol information with its rivals, CompTIA called the $357m (£175m) fine "arbitrary and capricious".

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Tied with Torvalds at 47 percent were Sergey Brin and Larry Page who, as Stanford University PhD students, founded Google in 1998.

The search giant announced in November that it would be targeting the mobile platform in a big way with the launch of its Android operating system and middleware.

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John Chambers, chairman and chief executive of Cisco Systems, came in sixth at 44 percent.

Cisco has risen to dominance in the IP networking market, garnering more than 80 percent market share in the IP routing and switching equipment category, the plumbing that connects corporate networks and the internet.

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Larry Ellison, chief executive and member of the board of directors of Oracle, was nominated by 36 percent of respondents.

Oracle has been on a buying spree of late and most recently snapped up business intelligence company Hyperion for $3.3bn (£1.7bn). The company also tried to buy BEA systems in October, but eventually withdrew its bid after resistance from the middleware maker's shareholders.

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Vint 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, was acknowledged by 35 percent of voters. Cerf currently works for Google as chief internet evangelist.

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Mentioned by 35 percent of voters, Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, is a controversial figure in the industry.

Known for his forceful personality and his enthusiastic stage presentations, Ballmer has been labelled with the moniker "monkey boy" in some circles.

"I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life," Ballmer said in a morning keynote at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida in 2005. Ballmer was responding to a comment regarding well-publicised testimony by a former employee that Ballmer had tossed furniture and vowed to "kill Google" when informed of the employee's decision to leave Microsoft for the search firm.

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Meg Whitman, president and chief executive of eBay since 1998, came in at tenth place, mentioned by 30 percent of voters.

Despite presiding over one of the most successful online businesses, with the possible exception of Amazon.com, Whitman has come under some flack recently. In October eBay posted a sharp net loss due to a $1.39bn (£680m) writedown on the purchase of web-based phone service Skype. Industry watchers have questioned the send of the deal between the online auction site and the IP telephony organisation since it was struck in 2005.

Nearly two years after the acquisition closed, there is little integration between eBay's auction website and the Skype voice service. Even though Skype has grown into the largest VoIP provider on the planet, the bottom line is clear — it still hasn't made enough money to justify the hefty $2.6bn price tag.

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