Tuesday, January 29, 2008

All-time Most Influential Technologists

Intel ... assembled a panel of experts including academics, journalists and independent third parties to vote on technology's 45 most influential people: HEXUS.net - Headline :: Intel lists its 45 most influential technologists : Page - 1/1

This is really an esteemed list. Tim Berners-Lee deserves a Nobel prize for the impact that the Web has had, and will have, on the world. I wouldn't put the founders of Google so high, though. Isn't Google just the search engine du jour? If this list was made a few years ago, would the founders of Yahoo or even (shudder) Netscape or AOL have been listed?

Who else doesn't belong? Who else is missing?

Check out the comments below the article for Wikipedia links to biographies.

3 comments:

John said...

Nice post, John - I guess the top spot is well deserved, but only if you narrowed the supposed time-span of consideration to 50 years instead of the 150 they claimed to be considering. I think the criteria for the list needs to be re-stated to say that the voting was for "COMPUTER technology’s 45 most influential individuals". Certainly not all technologists focus on computers and the internet. What would you rate higher? WWW or the automobile?

And the Google-guys? Not a chance. I don't agree that Google is simply the search engine du jour, but #2 and #3 on a list of influence spanning 150 years? Not likely.

JMF

John said...

Good point, JohnF! The list of most influential technologists is heavily skewed to computer or electronic technology.

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