Chairman and co-founder Bill Gates ranks No. 1 in a list of the most influential people in IT over the past 25 years，media reported Friday.
Gates was selected by 84 percent of the participants. Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple, was selected by 73 percent of those taking the poll. Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell, got the nod from 53 percent of CompTIA voters.
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, made the list with 47 percent of the vote, tying for fourth place with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Coincidentally, Google's vast server infrastructure relies on Linux.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (L) and Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes shake hands after the launch of Unified Communications 2007, a business communications software, in San Francisco October, 16, 2007.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, came in fifth (44 percent). Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle ranked sixth (36 percent). Vinton Cerf, who (with Bob Kahn) co-designed the TCP/IP protocol upon which the Internet is built, placed seventh (35 percent). Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, came in eighth (35 percent). And Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay, was ninth (30 percent).
Marc Andreesen, co-creator of the Mosaic Web browser (with Eric Bina) and the co-founder of Netscape, didn't make the list. Adding insult to that omission, CompTIA voters rated Internet Explorer (66 percent) as most influential technology product in the past 25 years, followed by Microsoft Word (56 percent) and Windows 95 (50 percent).
Apple's iPod and Microsoft Excel tied for fourth place among products (49 percent).
The list was compiled by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a tech trade group with 22,000 members. The poll got 473 votes, mostly from people who have worked in the tech industry for at least three years.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
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