Gates and Jobs Battle it Out in Top 10 Influencers

The battles between Microsoft and Apple have hit their CEOs, as the two companies’ respective chiefs were named the industry’s most influential personalities, top and second, respectively, of the past 25 years, according to a poll by the Computing Technology Industry Association.

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, claimed the top spot on the most influential list, named by 84 percent of the 473 IT industry professionals who participated in the Web-based poll.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, placed second on the list of most influential IT person of the past 25 years. Jobs was selected by 73 percent of voters.

Dell CEO Michael Dell came third and was named by 53 percent of voters. Tied for fourth, both with 47 percent, was Linus Torvalds, writer of the original Linux code, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who founded Google.

The top 10 most influential IT industry personalities of the past 25 years according to the CompTIA poll were:

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft (84 percent)

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple (73 percent)

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell (53 percent)

Linus Torvalds, writer of the original Linux code (47 percent)

Sergey Brin and Larry Page (47 percent)

John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems (44 percent)

Larry Ellison, CEO and member of the board of directors of Oracle (36 percent)

Vinton 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 (35 percent)

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft (35 percent)

Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay since 1998 (30 percent)