10 least influential people in the IT business

The list of the 10 least influential people is made by analogy with the popular charts of the "most famous" and "richest." But this list is based on a different principle. This includes people whose importance is either greatly overestimated, or whose real influence has already disappeared. The list is compiled without any sorting.

Steve Ballmer , executive director of Microsoft Corporation. The head of the world's largest software corporation, to be honest, is far from being clever and does not behave very well in public, and there is nothing to say about his talent as a strategist and visionary. Previously, all tricks forgive him. But now, after the departure of Bill Gates, shareholders may begin to search for a more serious candidate for the post of director.

Jeffrey Citron, Chairman and "Chief Strategist" of Vonage Corporation. American journalists recall the head of Vonage and the unsuccessful IPO, and the unsuccessful business of this Internet provider, especially in terms of bringing paid VoIP services to the market.
')
Reed Hastings (Reed Hastings), CEO of Netflix . He created a powerful DVD rental empire that could very soon collapse under the pressure of digital video and Internet services.

Ken Kutaragi , President, Sony Computer Entertainment . This man seems to have forgotten how his company “spanked” the video format Betamax, which in all respects was better than VHS, but nevertheless gave the competitor the market. Now Sony has started the same war with the standard Blu-Ray discs.

Warren Lieberfarb, Principal Consultant HD-DVD Promotion Group . In Hollywood, this man is known as the “father of the DVD,” and he certainly remembers the Betamax / VHS war. But now, instead of helping to find a compromise and come to a single standard, as he did in the case of the DVD, this person stands on the side of Microsoft, Toshiba and other companies promoting the HD-DVD format . The funny thing is that this whole war can be meaningless. Now users are not going to throw out their DVDs at all, and by the time new formats appear on the market, the video may be distributed via the Internet.

Rob Malda, the Slashdot team blog. There used to be times when hit on Slashdot meant the inevitable fall of the site under the influx of visitors. Now other times have come, and Slashdot quickly surrendered to its rival Digg .

Arun Sarin , Executive Director of Vodafone . The world's largest mobile operator has an annual turnover of $ 100 billion and 171 million subscribers worldwide. However, in the past quarter, the British company announced a loss of $ 40 billion. This has never happened with any British company - this is an absolute historical record. Perhaps Vodafone has tough times ahead.

Jonathan Schwartz , Executive Director, Sun Microsystems . This young man was recently appointed to the post of director of the company. He has a huge number of ideas, some of which he expresses in his blog, but so far all efforts have been unsuccessful. The company can not get out of the crisis.

Linus Torvalds (Linus Torvalds), the creator of Linux, lost all influence of his own free will. His operating system is now a national treasure, and Linus has absolutely no control over its distribution. However, it was conceived. In fact, the project has long outgrown its creator.

Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), founder of Facebook . This talented entrepreneur quickly made Facebook one of the most popular social networks on the Internet. But he was not lucky. Last spring, he missed the moment when $ 750 million was offered for his website. He wanted $ 2 billion. After that, the situation developed like this: News Corp. bought MySpace for $ 580 million, and a new leader appeared on the social networking market.