Gates, Jobs Top I.T. Personalities of Past 25 Years

Perhaps the only person who could have challenged Bill Gates in this poll was Steve Jobs, and he gave it a good run, finishing a strong second. The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) polled 473 Information Technology (I.T.) industry professionals about the industry's most influential personalities of the past 25 years.

Bill Gates was named by 84%, while Steve Jobs was named by 73%. Michael Dell, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Dell, finished a distant third at 53%.

The entire top 10 list is:

• Bill Gates (84%)
  
• Steve Jobs (73%)
  
• Michael Dell (53%)
  
• Linus Torvalds (47%)
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page who, as Stanford University Ph.D. students, founded Google in 1998 (I guess they are considered one entity) (47%)
• John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems (44%)
• Larry Ellison, CEO and member of the board of directors of Oracle (36%)
• Vinton Cerf, commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathers of the Internet" (35%)
• Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft (35%)
• Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay since 1998 (30%)