Category: Bill Gates

Speaking to a BBC reporter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates predicted that the current economic downturn is going to last several years, but he also struck a confident tone about the development of technology and science as well as the potential of capitalism to foster innovation and opportunity that will help the world recover from its current problems.

“There’s no doubt that the short term is going to be very rough. There’s a lot of cutbacks going on across many industries,” said Gates.

“[But] great innovation in companies and universities are creating new medicines, creating genetic understanding, new materials, better software, and those are the engines of progress that will get the economy back up and going. I feel confident that in a 5-10 year time-frame we’ll be in that trend.”

Watch the 13-minute BBC video clip in which Bill and Melinda Gates talk about the current state of the economy, technology, software, and the work that their foundation is doing to help people across the globe during difficult times.

This is a guest post from Larry Dignan of TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet. You can follow Larry on his ZDNet blog Between the Lines, or subscribe to the RSS feed. This is Larry’s 2008 recap of the year in tech news, in both video and text.

Welcome to the year in tech news. 2008 was a wild one and January feels like it was 20 years ago. Here’s a brief recap….

January: The year kicks off with the usual Consumer electronics show, which is then upstaged by Macworld. Bill Gates delivers his last keynote. Meanwhile merger mania kicked off the year. Oracle wins BEA Systems; Sun acquires MySQL and proclaims itself an open source leader and SAP closes its Business Objects purchase. eBay CEO Meg Whitman steps down.

February: Microsoft makes a bid for Yahoo kicking off a never-ending soap opera that turns into shareholder tragedy. Apple signals that the iPhone will become more business friendly. Netscape goes away forever. CIO surveys indicate that ERP software is en vogue.

March: Google’s every hiccup is monitored to see if its search monetization is slowing. Yahoo plays defense to prevent Microsoft acquisition, talks to Time Warner, proxy war duel looms. AOL acquires Bebo to expand its social networking footprint. Russell Shaw, one of ZDNet’s finest, passes away.

April: Microsoft entertains the thought of raising its Yahoo bid but refrains. Yahoo climbs into bed with Google to thwart Microsoft. SAP delays BusinessByDesign. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang takes $1 salary in 2007 and earns every penny. Psystar brings back the Mac clone much to Apple’s chagrin.

May: Sun lays off workers, blames U.S. economy. It’s really just the first installment of a long year of pain for Sun. Microsoft walks away from Yahoo, but not really. Wimax is saved after Clearwire and Sprint form joint venture and Google and Intel back it. HP buys EDS.

June: Yahoo adopts poison pill to keep Microsoft away. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn enters the Microhoo fray. He wants Yang gone. Yahoo announces Google search pact. Microsoft is really gone now. Icahn stuck in proxy fight and money losing investment. Apple unveils MobileMe–its personal cloud meets iPhone service and problems abound. Gates’ last day at Microsoft as an executive.

July: Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization starts to give VMware headaches. Michael Dell buys $100 million of Dell stock (and winds up losing money). Yahoo cuts deal with Icahn. Icahn and Steve Ballmer get chummy to turn up the heat on Yang. Amazon suffers S3 outage, the latest in a string.

August: FCC slaps Comcast on wrist for network neutrality violations. Yahoo faces its shareholders. Microsoft showcases Silverlight via NBC’s Olympics site. Silverlight passes test with flying colors. Complaints surface about Apple’s newly launched iPhone 3G. Palm launches Treo Pro. Google and Yahoo tell the feds they are proceeding with their search deal.

September: Google launches its Chrome browser to take on Firefox and IE. Microsoft launches a pro Vista ad campaign with Jerry Seinfeld, but no one gets the joke. Wall Street melts down, financial services spending pullbacks hurt tech companies.

October: Economy worsens as do technology earnings. CIOs plan for Armageddon budgets. Yahoo shares plummet further. Jerry Yang looks silly for not taking Microsoft’s buyout offer, plans Yahoo restructuring. AMD unveils its asset smart strategy; plans to spin off manufacturing unit. Ballmer says it’s ok to wait for Windows 7 (as if he has a choice) and says a Yahoo deal still makes sense.

November: Google walks away from Yahoo search deal. Will Yahoo and Microsoft cut a deal? Yang delivers dreadful Web 2.0 Expo keynote. Yang steps down as Yahoo CEO.  Icahn averages down on his Yahoo investment to grab a 5.4 percent stake. He’s still underwater by a few miles. Verizon Wireless launches blackberry Storm–an alleged iPhone killer. Barack Obama wins presidential election; plans to bring in U.S. CTO. Sun cuts more jobs as it is crushed by weak economy. Intel’s quarter unravels.

December: Apple and Steve Jobs bail on Macworld. It’s a bah humbug electronics Christmas. IT spending expectations are low for 2009 and enterprise software is in flux. Chrome leaves beta. Intuit steps into a TurboTax mess over printing fees and backtracks.  As we leave the year numerous questions are left hanging? Does Sun have a future? What’s Yahoo’s future course following layoffs? We’ll find out in 2009. How’s Microsoft’s year shaping up?

Whether or not you’re a fan of Bill Gates, it’s impossible to deny the role he has played in spreading computer technology across the planet during the past three decades. His retirement as a full-time Microsoft employee in June 2008 marked the end of an era — and it’s one worth looking back on. This episode of Sanity Savers for IT executives discusses five of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the meteoric and often turbulent career of the world’s most famous IT professional.

For those of you who prefer text to video, you can go to the video player page for this episode and click “Full Transcipt,” or you can read my original article that this episode was based on: Five things we have learned from Bill Gates.

At the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett launched the $400,000 Inspire-Empower Challenge for solving world problems with technology. Barrett is increasingly taking a leading role as a key ambassador of the IT industry to the United Nations and the rest of the world.

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Now that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has retired from his full-time job at Microsoft in order to devote his energy to the Gates Foundation, other IT leaders would like to step into the void as the technology industry’s leading diplomat to the world. Intel is nominating its chairman, Craig Barrett, for the post.

At the opening keynote for the Intel Developer Forum 2008 in San Francisco on Tuesday, Intel introduced Barrett as “the IT industry’s ambassador” and highlighted the fact that Barrett will visit 30 countries this year, meet with various heads of state, and chair a United Nations task force on technology in the developing world.

Intel’s Craig Barrett introduces Nigerian students to the Classmate PC. 

I’m not sure if Gates, who remains chairman of the board at Microsoft and is still spending 20% of his time on Microsoft-related work, is ready to give up his post as the IT industry’s de facto leader. I suspect that we’ll still see plenty of Gates as a keynote speaker at events and that he won’t be able to avoid giving reporters his commentary on how things are unfolding in the technology world.

Nevertheless, Intel’s Barrett would be an interesting replacement if Gates does truly fade into the backgound. While Gates has always been user-centric and his vision has been focused on the things users can do with technology, Barrett is more focused on how technology can improve and transform society.

“Technology is a tool to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges related to health care, education, economic development and the environment,” said Barrett. “No nations or individuals are untouched by these issues.”

Barrett is also not afraid to confront politicians publicly, while Gates has tended to deal with politicians and leaders more privately. For example, in his IDF keynote on Tuesday, Barrett launched several criticisms at the U.S. government and its policies:

• He upbraided the U.S. for not doing enough with research and development tax credits. “R&D is how you move forward in the world’s economic system,” said Barrett.
• He decried the K-12 educational system in the U.S. and put the blame not on funding but on not doing enough to hire and certify top-notch teachers.
• He criticized the U.S. for not allowing doctors to be paid when they treat patients over the phone (or other electronic systems) because those policies are holding back developments in electronic medicine.

For more on Barrett’s advice for U.S. political leaders, see IDF Opening Keynote: Are you listening, Washington? from Sam Diaz over at ZDNet.

Barrett also used his IDF keynote to launch Intel’s Inspire-Empower Challenge, a contest to develop the best technology solutions in four areas where there are critical global challenges: health care, economic development, education, and the environment. Intel will award $100,000 in seed funding to the winning project in each of the four categories. The top criteria for the winners will be innovation and sustainability.

The Bill Gates era in the technology industry has come to an end. Despite all of the attention generated by Gates’ official “retirement” from Microsoft, I only found one useful perspective on the issue.

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With June 27, 2008 supposedly Bill Gates’ last day as a full time employee at Microsoft as he prepared to dedicate his time to the Gates Foundation, the media swarmed around the story, writing retrospective pieces about the world that Bill Gates made and predictions about how a Gates-less Microsoft would act in the years ahead.

The frenzy got so bad that during the weeks surrounding Gates’ retirement, tech journalist John Dvorak kept ranting about the thousands of redundant stories being published about what he considered a non-event (Dvorak believes it was a publicity stunt and that Gates will be back full-time in the future). Nevertheless, Dvorak’s continual rants across various media outlets only added fueled the fire. Everyone had a story about Gates’ retirement and many of them also had opinions about the Gates legacy.

Now that the dust has settled on Gates’ retirement from Microsoft, I’d like to add one last opinion on the subject. Actually, I’d like to highlight the most intelligent opinion that I read during all of the frenzied coverage at the end of June.

Ironically, it came from The Economist in its article The Meaning of Bill Gates. It’s ironic because in 1991 Gates said that he reads The Economist “cover to cover” every week, so it seems fitting that The Economist was the only publication to really get it right about Gates’ retirement. The article ran in the June 28, 2008 issue and here are the most poignant quotes from the article:

Inevitability and temperament are two hallmarks of Gates the innovator. The third is the transience of all pioneers. The argument was brilliantly laid out by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School. The perfecting of a technology by a well managed company catering to its best customers leaves it vulnerable to “disruption” by a cheaper, scrappier alternative that is good enough for everyone else…

Mr Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet computing. This does not diminish his achievement. Nor, as some would have it, does his philanthropy necessarily magnify it. Whatever the corporate-social-responsibility gurus say, business is a force for good in itself: its most useful contribution to society is making profits and products. Philanthropy no more canonises the good businessman than it exculpates the bad. In spite of his flaws, Mr Gates is one of the good kind. Some great industrialists, like Henry Ford, stick around even as the world moves on and their powers fail. Mr Gates, pragmatic to the end, is leaving at the top.

I’m not sure Gates is leaving on top — Microsoft probably peaked in 2006 before the launch of Vista — but this is pretty close to it. Gates has always known and feared that an upstart would do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to IBM. Linux was supposed to be that upstart, but it has since passed the mantle to Google.

Google has made Microsoft an underdog again, and that’s a role that fits Bill Gates very well.  However, Gates has been through all of this before, and this time he’s made it clear that he’d rather spend his time fighting malaria and other diseases than battling Google for dominance in cloud computing.

Nevertheless, although he may not be as well-suited or have the same powerful vision for the new collaborative age of computing, I still think Gates could ultimately find a new vision to inspire users and turn a profit for Microsoft. And, if Microsoft falters in the next couple years, I fully expect Gates to swoop back in and try to come to the rescue. John Dvorak and I do agree on that.

With the Bill Gates era coming to an end at Microsoft, this is the perfect opportunity to look back and examine five preeminent lessons we have learned from the world’s greatest computer geek.
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Whether or not you are a fan of Bill Gates, it is impossible to deny the impact he has made on the spread of computer technology across the planet during the past three decades. Since Friday was Gates’ last day as a full-time Microsoft employee, this is the perfect time to look back at five of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the meteoric, tumultuous, and lucrative career of the world’s most famous software engineer.

5. Geeks can be businessmen, too

Before Bill Gates, computer programmers were mostly considered to be a necessary evil for businesses. They were stereotyped as misanthropic weirdos that you stick in dark corners in the back office. However, Gates, became the most successful businessman on earth — if you judge business success by profits — and almost singlehandedly transformed the term “geek” from an insult to a badge of honor in the process.

4. You don’t have to be first to win

Gates and Microsoft rarely got to the party first with new technologies and innovations, but they were simply better at bringing technology products to the masses than anyone else in the industry. Internet Explorer is the most famous example, but Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel are also great examples. Microsoft was merely better at executing. It didn’t hurt that Microsoft often had the most resources, but Gates and Co. showed over and over again that they knew how to best take advantage of those resources.

3. Computing will spread everywhere

In the 1980s when the computer was still mostly a novelty, Gates expressed his vision that there would one day be “a computer on every desk and in every home.” That vision has nearly become a reality in the U.S. and it’s in the process of coming to fruition across the globe. Plus, Gates’ vision of the computing experience has continued to inspire the industry in general as well as Microsoft’s product plans — from the smartphone to the Tablet PC to speech recognition to the touch-based interface.

2. Arrogance breeds failure

In the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, the Bill Gates character says to Steve Ballmer, “Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking that they can’t lose.” He was referring to IBM and the fact that it let Microsoft sneak in and steal the thunder in the launch of the PC. A decade later, Microsoft’s own success and arrogance led to its anti-trust defeat to the U.S. government. But Microsoft also remained humble and paranoid enough to always be on the lookout for the next small company that might do to it what it had done to IBM. Some of the most popular targets in its cross hairs: Apple, Netscape, Linux, and Google.

1. Software matters

The one message that Bill Gates spent his career reiterating was that software matters. Gates and Microsoft always believed in the magic of software to create amazing digital experiences. When “Micros-Soft” (as it was originally known) first launched in the 1970s, the computer business was all about the hardware. It was Gates and his vision of what people could do with computers that moved software to the center of the computing experience.

Top 10 IT headlines

1. Gates rules out returning to Microsoft (ZDNet)
2. IBM cools chips with ‘tiny rivers’ of H2O; Aims to stretch Moore’s Law (ZDNet)
3. BlackBerry defies stagnant tech spending (TechWeb)
4. Google calls for hike in H-1B visas (ZDNet)
5. Intel, AMD lawsuit pushed off to 2010 (eWEEK)
   
6. Linux success on UMPCs nudges Microsoft’s XP strategy (TechRepublic)
7. Google to let users test new Gmail features (CNET)
8. The future of e-paper: The Kindle is only the beginning (Computerworld)
9. Asus’ all-in-one PC: The Eee Monitor (CNET)
10. Poll: Will your IT department support an enterprise-ready iPhone? (TechRepublic)

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On Tuesday at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2008 in Orlando, Bill Gates gave what was billed as his last keynote as a full-time Microsoft employee. He talked about the past and the future of software development and even made a few product announcements.

Gates said:

“When I think back on the early days of development when we were all programming in DOS, and then take a look at what we can do now with technologies like the .NET Framework, it simply amazes me how far we’ve come. I started out as a developer and that’s what I remain at heart, so I have a personal interest in the future of the field. I am confident that the path we are laying out today will serve you well into the future.”

I doubt this will be the last Gates keynote, and I think it’s very likely that he could return to Microsoft full-time if there’s even a hint that he’s still needed. Nevertheless, this is a speech worth seeing.

Watch the video of the entire Gates keynote (you’ll need to have Silverlight installed):

Some pundits and tech industry observers think that the retirement of Bill Gates will allow Microsoft to make the transition from a PC-centered company to an Internet company. Others think Microsoft needs the leadership of Gates in order to make such a radical shift. What do you think?

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When Eric Schmidt left his job as the chairman and CEO of Novell to become the top executive at Google in 2001 he privately told journalist John Battelle that one of the things he was looking forward to was no longer competing with Microsoft.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer badly trounced Novell during Schmidt’s four-year stay (1997-2001) at the Provo, Utah software company. And before that, Microsoft siphoned off server revenue from Sun Microsystems during Schmidt’s tenure as Sun CTO from 1994-1997. From those experiences, Schmidt knew that Microsoft played hardball and occasionally played fast and loose with silly little details like anti-trust laws and government regulations.

Illustration credit: Hellovon for Portfolio.com

Schmidt came out of his stints at Sun and Novell battered and bruised by Microsoft. He had no desire to go toe-to-toe with Gates and Ballmer again. Taking a job at an Internet search engine — which was growing rapidly but still struggling for an idea of how to make money — hardly looked like a company that would compete with Microsoft in its core businesses.

What a difference seven years makes.

Under Schmidt’s leadership, Google has figured out how to make money, lots of it — $5.19 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter. The vast majority of that money comes from its search ads business, but Google has also forayed into the applications business. And now the combination of applications and search ads has Microsoft spooked.

While Google Apps have thus far done very little to erode the market share of Microsoft Office, the conventional wisdom in the IT industry is that software-as-a-serve (SaaS) such as Google Apps is where the market is moving, and that the owners of tomorrow are planting their stakes in the ground right now.

Google is very well positioned. It already has hundreds of millions of online users. It has the software and hardware infrastructure to handle SaaS and it has the strongest and most trusted brand name on the Web. No one understands this better than Microsoft. That’s why Ballmer swung for the fences and tried to acquire Yahoo.

The collapse of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal has one big winner: Google. It also has two big losers: Yahoo and Ballmer. Yahoo will have a very difficult time creating the amount of value for its shareholders that Microsoft was offering. Ballmer swung for the fences and whiffed in this deal. He’ll fight on, but the fact that he went after Yahoo was a de facto admission that he does not have much faith in his troops to take on Google alone.

While I doubt that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo would have done much to stop Google’s momentum on the Web, it’s clear that neither of the two companies have shown the ability to innovate or execute on a broadly successful Web search strategy. And until someone can find a way to compete with Google on search — the primary method most people use to approach the Internet — Google’s growth and momentum will continue unchecked. And one day soon Google will transfer a lot of those users to its online applications en mass. It’s already started with Gmail, and to a lesser extent, Google Apps. Nearly everyone in the technology sector sees it coming, even Microsoft. And even Google itself.

Google knows that it has the potential to become as large and as powerful as Microsoft. It knows that it is on course to become the next Microsoft — potentially even bigger and more powerful when you consider the fact that it could soon control the largest compilation of information ever gathered in human history.

Google’s entire culture of “Don’t be evil” is a direct reaction to Microsoft, which Google believes did become evil once it got big and powerful and began wielding its influence to crush smaller competitors, upstarts, and companies that didn’t cooperate with Microsoft’s vision of the tech sector. Schmidt recently commented on this in an interview for Portfolio magazine:

“We had a debate about this a while ago, and it had nothing to do with Yahoo. The question was how to prevent what happened at Microsoft from happening at Google. Consumers have had more choice on the Internet. And we have a set of policies that we follow - entrenched inside the culture - the most important of which is that we won’t trap user data in proprietary systems. So we have a rule: You have to make it possible for people who don’t like your service to get out. If I don’t like Google, I can switch to Yahoo, Microsoft, or whatever. This has another impact that’s not as obvious. It serves as a check and balance on poor-quality teams. They can’t prevent users from fleeing bad products. It also helps us with this question of becoming too big and powerful.”

Whether users ultimately believe that and decide to fully trust Google remains to be seen. Over the next several years, Google is going to be heavily scrutinized for its privacy and security practices once it becomes public knowledge how much data Google is sitting on, especially individual user data, history, and usage patterns.

As for Schmidt, he not only has the clear upper hand on the Web with Google, but he also joined the board of directors at Apple in 2006. With Apple eating away at Windows market share and publicly excoriating Windows in the “Get a Mac” commercials, Schmidt’s work at Apple is also helping to quietly undermine one of Microsoft’s core businesses.

Last year, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Schmidt and Battelle shared the stage for a keynote interview. In that session, Battelle reminded Schmidt of his comment about not competing with Microsoft when he first joined Google.

“I was wrong,” Schmidt admitted.

Like it not, Eric Schmidt is destined to go down in history as one of the most active opponents to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the Microsoft legacy. During the past seven years, Schmidt’s role in that saga has changed from whipping boy to white knight, and unless something dramatic happens it’s very likely that Google and Schmidt will ultimately be portrayed as the good guys — and the winners.

10. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco CTO

Last week, Padmasree Warrior — one of the few non-CEOs on this list — stepped down as the CTO of Motorola and was introduced as the new CTO of Cisco. This was a huge coup for Cisco, since Warrior has been a driving force for innovation at Motorola and she knows how to harness the creative power of engineers. CTOs are often the “chief innovation officers” at tech companies and are also becoming key public evangelists of their innovations to their fellow technology professionals. Warrior is great example of how to skillfully juggle those two roles.

9. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO

During 2007, no one had a greater impact on the evolution of business software than Marc Benioff. His product, Salesforce.com, emerged from being an upstart Web-based CRM (customer relationship management) package to being the leader of the Software-as-a-Service movement and the developer of a full SaaS platform (force.com). Powered by Benioff’s vision, the company’s motto is “No Software,” but what it really wants to do is to bring an end to shrink-wrapped software and replace it with an on-demand software model. In the wake of the dot-com bust, that was considered a Utopian dream, but the success of Salesforce.com is opening up new possibilities. That’s why I named it No. 8 on my list of The 10 most important business technology products of 2007.

8. Paul Otellini, Intel CEO

Intel went through some tough years in 2005 and 2006, when the company was still reeling from the Itanium failure, playing catch-up to AMD on the chips used by the masses, and going through the largest round of layoffs (10,500 employees, or 10% of the workforce) in company history. Otellini took over the reins of Intel in spring 2005 when Intel was in the midst of all that turmoil, and Otellini was the one who executed the layoffs. The turnaround began at the beginning of 2007 with the launch of the Core Duo processors, which offered much faster performance while consuming less power.

During 2007, Intel took back lost market share from AMD, powered by the Core Duo. Plus, at the Intel Developer Forum in September, Intel announced its 45-nanometer breakthrough, which will eventually power another wave of advances in performance and energy efficiency. While many of these plans were put in motion long before Otellini took over, Otellini has played his hand well in Intel’s traditional strength of computer chips, and he has also provided a broader vision of Intel as a global technology company with projects such as WiMAX and the Classmate PC.

7. Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO

For most big tech companies, the list of failed acquisitions badly outnumbers the list of successful ones. Cisco has always been the exception. Oracle may now be the other exception. Larry Ellison has used the war chest Oracle built up during the tech boom of the 1990s to make a flurry of acquisitions over the past several years, including a few blockbusters like Siebel and PeopleSoft. By successfully integrating these companies and their products, Ellison has transformed Oracle from a database company to a major provider of backend business software and platforms. While Oracle’s attempted acquisition of BEA fell through in 2007, and Salesforce.com poses a new threat to Oracle, I would expect Ellison to continue his buying spree and to look to expand his empire into SaaS. An acquisition of Salesforce.com or, more likely its rival NetSuite, could be on the top of the list in 2008.

6. Carly Fiorina, former HP CEO

It turns out that the merger between Hewlett-Packard and Compaq in 2001 — which was orchestrated by former HP CEO Carly Fiorina — was a masterstroke that has created one of the world’s largest and most important business technology companies. It took several years for the full value of the merger to manifest itself, and Wall Street’s impatience during that period led HP to fire Fiorina in 2005, but its success was never clearer than in 2007. In units shipped, HP is now the worldwide leader in desktop and notebook PCs, x86 servers, Windows servers, Linux servers, blade servers, UNIX servers, high-end UNIX servers, and disk and storage systems.

Although the popular view is to credit HP’s dramatic rise to current CEO Mark Hurd — and Hurd certainly deserves credit for strong execution over the past two years — the fact is that much of HP’s success in 2007 traces its roots back to Fiorina’s vision and the methodical work done to merge HP and Compaq under her leadership. She deserves a victory lap.

5. Barry West, Sprint CTO

One of the most important developments in business technology in 2007 was the progress of Sprint’s Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) network, which is on track to become the world’s first major deployment of Mobile WiMAX — as opposed to Fixed WiMAX (802.16d). Sprint’s Mobile WiMAX will provide a true taste of roaming broadband Internet, the high-speed communications platform of the future. During the second half of 2007, Sprint got its WiMAX trials up and running in the Chicago and the Washington D.C. areas. Commercial launch will happen in those two cities during the first half of 2008 and Sprint is also prepping Mobile WiMAX networks in several other major metro U.S. cities for the second half of 2008.

As I wrote last week in Sprint should thumb its nose at Wall Street and proceed with WiMAX, Sprint’s long-term investments in WiMAX have led to Wall Street discontent with the company’s short-term results, and it cost CEO Gary Forsee his job in October. Those developments have put pressure on Sprint to slow down its WiMAX plans. However, Sprint still has CTO Barry West at the steering wheel on WiMAX, and he apparently has not taken his foot off the gas. I applaud him for that. Sprint’s WiMAX plans have the potential to start a revolution in both the Internet and mobile phone industries in the United States and change Sprint’s role from a laggard to a leader in the U.S. wireless race.

4. Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman

Don’t forget that 2007 was the last full year that Bill Gates will work at Microsoft. In July 2008, he will became a part-time Microsoft employee and will spend most of his time working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While the man who pioneered the PC revolution has lost a little bit of his cutting edge prominence in recent years, he still has a strong vision for where computing is headed, and that vision has a major impact on both Microsoft’s corporate strategy and the direction of the technology industry in general. In 2007, Gates pushed for development in touch-based interfaces and voice recognition. He also led Microsoft to develop software for robots, even though they are years away from arriving as a real-world product. So don’t expect Gates to quietly disappear into the sunset. His passion for the computing industry will keep him involved, and his vision will continue to influence products for several years to come.

3. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO

What’s this guy doing on a business technology list? Steve is here for two reasons: the iPhone and the Mac. The iPhone was the hottest technology product of 2007 and it was No. 1 on my list of The 10 most important business technology products of 2007 because of its catalyzing effect on the smartphone market. Plus, even though the iPhone does not have push e-mail and it was not designed as a business smartphone, it has been adopted for business use by many executives, consultants, sales people, and other independent operators.

The Mac began its resurgence in January 2006 with the switch to Intel processors. Traditionally, the only place you would regularly find Macs in businesses were in the graphic arts departments. However, Macs are rapidly becoming the de facto standard for video production — a booming field — and in 2007, they even started gaining popularity among IT professionals, who can use Macs to administer both UNIX servers (because of Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings) and Windows servers (by running a standard installation of Windows XP or Windows Vista on Boot Camp or using virtualization software such as Parallels or VMware Fusion). IT pros used to be hostile to Macs, which is one of the things that limited their use in businesses. Now that many IT pros are warming up to them, it’s a lot easier for many workers to get Macs and for IT to support them. Apple’s influence and penetration into businesses has never been greater. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if Steve Jobs decided to target business users more directly.

2. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect

When Bill Gates announced his impending 2008 retirement back on June 15, 2006, there was a joint announcement that Ray Ozzie was being promoted from CTO to chief software architect, the role that Gates had occupied since 2000, when he handed over the CEO duties to Steve Ballmer. Ozzie, who joined the company as part of Microsoft’s 2005 acquisition of Groove Networks and was once the leader of the Lotus Notes development team, essentially moved into the top software strategy role at Microsoft. Since that time, it’s become clear that Ozzie — who is Microsoft’s most outspoken internal advocate for SaaS — has been moving Microsoft toward becoming a software services company. With the 2007 advancements of Silverlight, Office Live, and Windows Live — all fledging services — it’s likely that we’ve only seen the very beginnings of what Microsoft will do in this new Web software paradigm. Only now it’s Ray Ozzie rather than Bill Gates who is driving Microsoft’s strategy.

1. John Chambers, Cisco CEO

Like many of the large companies on this list, Cisco Systems is in the midst of a transformation. The difference between Cisco and most of the others on the list is that there’s a lot of confidence that Cisco will successfully navigate its transition. That’s mostly due to the leadership of John Chambers. When Chambers became the CEO of Cisco in 1995, the company brought in about $1 billion in annual revenue. In 2007, Cisco will bring in more than $30 billion in revenue.

While Cisco’s bread-and-butter is still the networking equipment that connects and powers corporate networks and the Internet, Cisco is rapidly expanding into collaboration software, unified communications equipment and software, and video conferencing. Chambers is a maestro at pulling off acquisitions. He has an excellent track record of picking the right companies to buy and successfully integrating them into Cisco. During 2007, Cisco bought Web conferencing leader WebEx, and Chambers indicated that it was likely the first of several buys in the Web 2.0 space when he said, “This truly is the top of the first inning of a nine-inning game.” Cisco also bought several social networking sites. These moves are definitely a major departure for Cisco, but you won’t find too many people willing to bet against them, especially while John Chambers is in charge.

10 who didn’t make the list

• Mark Hurd (Hewlett-Packard) — See No. 6 above in relation to Carly Fiorina.
• Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems) — Sun made some nice moves by open sourcing Java and moving toward x86 servers, but those moves have a “me too” feel. Schwartz must demand innovation if Sun wants to regain its former glory.
• Matt Szulik (Red Hat) — Red Hat might have some cool stuff happening, but I haven’t heard anything about it. Either there’s not much happening or Red Hat needs better PR.
• Sam Palmisano (IBM) — With the Lenovo sale, IBM is focused squarely on serving big enterprises. However, it’s still not easy to explain in one or two sentences what IBM does now.
• Arun Sarin (Vodaphone) — Driving the world’s largest mobile phone operator is getting much more challenging with next-generation wireless peeking around the corner. Will Vodaphone’s 3G investments be enough to withstand WiMAX?
• Eric Schmidt (Google) — With Google Apps and Google Search Appliance, the company is making some moves toward business technology, but these guys are still focused mostly on consumer tech.
• Hector Ruiz (AMD) — After several years of excellent progress, AMD took it on the chin from Intel in 2007. Can AMD come up with a suitable answer to Core Duo?
• Linus Torvalds (Linux founder) — Linus, are you still working on the Linux kernel? Please send a postcard.
• Steve Ballmer (Microsoft) — Steve moves audiences at events, but his influence in 2007 was not nearly as significant as Gates or Ozzie. That should change with the retirement of Gates in 2008.
• Michael Dell (Dell) — Dell is still looking for answers after getting knocked off the market share mountaintop by a resurgent HP. Putting low-margin PCs in Wal-Mart doesn’t sound like the right answer, especially for a company whose strength has always been selling to businesses.

A recent poll by CompTIA asked IT professionals to vote on the most influential personalities in the IT industry during the past 25 years. The poll was part of CompTIA’s celebration of its 25th anniversary. Here’s the list of the top 10:

1. Bill Gates
2. Steve Jobs
3. Michael Dell
4. Linus Torvalds
5. Sergei Brin and Larry Page
6. John Chambers
7. Larry Ellison
8. Vint Cerf
9. Steve Ballmer
10. Meg Whitman

Note that 4 and 5 are actually a tie for fourth.

This list isn’t bad. Dell is a little too high. Chambers is a little too low. Ellison isn’t nearly as high as he’ll think he should be (only kidding, Larry). You could make a case that Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen belong on the list, since they invented the World Wide Web and the Web browser, respectively. Without them, Larry and Sergei would still be building servers out of the Legos.

What do you think about this list? Who is missing? Join the discussion.

CIO Magazine recently named its list of Seven Wonders of the IT World:

1. The Linux kernel
2. OQO, Model 02 (smallest PC to run Windows Vista)
3. IBM BlueGene/L (largest supercomputer)
4. The E-sciencE II project (largest computer grid)
5. Google data center in Oregon
6. NASA’s Voyager 1 satellite (the computer farthest from Earth)
7. Floating Webcam at the North Pole

I really like the concept of highlighting the top technological marvels of the IT world, but am I the only one who thinks that this list is pretty lame and unexciting?

How about MAE East and MAE West? They are the heart of the Internet. How about the Bill Gates house? It is the ultimate IT-enabled home for hosting business associates. What about Intel Research Labs? It’s pretty cool to see all those people in white coats building the next generation chips that will power computers, phones, and the Internet.

What else do you think should make the list of the seven wonders of the IT world? Join the discussion.

In my recap of last week’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates joint interview, I linked to the video of the event, which could be viewed online in eight separate segments. I also posted an eight-minute video clip of highlights from the event. However, the full Jobs/Gates interview video is now available as a free download on iTunes.

Additionally, iTunes offers a companion audio-only download of the full event. If you’re not an iTunes fan, I would expect that Microsoft will also offer a copy of the entire interview before long. Look for it in the Speeches and Keynotes section of Microsoft.com.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were remarkably good-natured and nostalgic in their joint interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher on May 30 at the fifth annual D: All Things Digital conference in San Diego. Here is an eight-minute highlight reel from the event.