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Who is the Most Influential Technologist of this Century?

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Last night I finally got round to watching a documentary about Steve Jobs. The guy was a genius.

But the film made a claim, that he was the most influential technologist of the last century. Really? I think that’s a bold claim, and when I think about it, I am not sure its true.

Let’s think about some of the candidates, and more importantly, as you think of each individual, imagine them looking cool in designer clothes and able to speak with panache and market themselves and their products with a deep understanding of the market.

Steve Jobs: Supremely able to leverage existing technologies (think the mouse/xerox) and see just around the curve to apply them in new contexts. More than any other, joined together the worlds of design and technology.

Bill Gates: So we had the personal PC, but it wasn’t remotely useful until Microsoft made it so with it’s software. Without Gates, computers would not have made it out of dusty universities.

Shiva Ayyadurai: Arguably invented email. I bet you have an email account, yes? Weren’t expecting that one were you?

Linus Torvalds: Popularized open source software, something that powers most of the web and a good chunk of hardware devices we use every day. And did it for altruism rather than dollars (cough, Jobs and Gates, cough). Sorry Stallman, you don’t make the cut here.

Page/Brin: Changed the way we consume information, and created a generation of content creators.

Zuckerberg: One billion can’t be wrong.

 

Who (or whose products) do you think most influenced your life?

  • I wrote this, then saw Sean Cook mentioned this guy too (good call!).

    Robert Noyce founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Co-inventor of the semiconductor, his science, ideas, inventions, competitive business practices, processes and rapid development (and “break-and-re-engineer”) approach set the table and brought the food (ah hell, he built the whole kitchen) from which all modern day technologists eat. Compared to Noyce, Jobs and Gates brought after dinner drinks and dessert trays.

    Since y2k? Meh. Time will tell, but most of the ones mentioned are really still skating on (and wringing out income from) ideas from the 1990s. Sure, Zuck/Page/Brin are influential, but let’s be honest, their give-it-away-for-free-in-order-to-turn-my-privacy-into-their-gold is in my opinion, evil (calling them “influential” is like Time Magazine naming Ayatolla Khomeini the “man of the year” in 1980). Elon Musk may be the only game-changer in the bunch, but his real influence will likely not be truly realized for another ten years.

    • Mr Musk certainly is a strong candidate. Not sure about Noyce. As Mark said below, would things be that different without him? Probably not that much.

      • Um, I’m afraid even Elon Musk would have to beg to differ with you on that statement, Barrie.

  • Who most influenced my life of technology? My dad, by a landslide. He was a mainframe and mini computer pioneer (IBM, GE, Honeywell, Prime, Encore). I connected to him via common backgrounds, and together we experienced and thoroughly enjoyed discussing the industry’s captivating innovate/rinse/repeat process.

  • simon sherlock

    How come Steve Wozniak doesn’t get a mention? Without him Steve Jobs would have been peddling something else! I have no doubt Steve J would still have been successful though – so much drive.
    Remember that Woz not only invented the personal computer but was the first to have one use a keyboard and (I think) monitor as well.

    Others made it all more usable (Bill Gates being primary here in my opinion) but without him where would the PC be?

  • Ali Vaili

    The film got it exactly right. Steve Jobs has created a great company twice or close to 2.5 times if you count Pixar- whereas everyone else has done it once. Apple is amongst the highest valued companies out there if not the highest. It was discussed in the ballpark of the first trillion dollar company and the only technology company to battle for the “Highest-Valued-company-title” successfully against the huge Oil Companies and Wal-Mart. To create a billion dollar company is difficult ask Mark Cuban. To create a 10’s of billions dollar company you’d have to ask Zuckerberg. To create a hundreds of billions dollar company you’d have to ask Page/Brin or Bill Gates. A Trillion dollar company you say? Well you can only ask Steve Jobs.

  • I guess I could have been clearer :). I meant THIS century. What tools, technologies and people have influenced how you are living your life in the last 13 years?

    Elon is another good candidate. How about Julian Assange or Jimmy Wales

  • Robert Norton Noyce (a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Noyce

    Without these early Silicon Valley days, we wouldn’t even have the computer that we have today!

  • OldMoldy

    I’ve read the first three comments and I think a good case can be made for Google (Page/Brin). We no longer look at encyclopedias as a source of knowledge but now commonly ask Dr. Google. Part of the genius here is the interpretation of natural language which makes the search function work. Back in the1980’s (3 decades ago) I was working with IBM research scientists who were trying to figure out how to bring this capability into products but this company has gone beyond technology to practical products that change the way we think, change the meaning of knowledge and truly shifted the paradigm for how people work with each other and share ideas and converse.

    • If you would have said that before Google started trading I would agree but with that and the release of Penguin and putting everyone in a search bubble their value as a search engine is not at all what it used to be. I don’t even use Google anymore for search and instead I am using Duck-Duck-Go who does not follow me around and determine what is best for me, but rather gives me ALL the results from a search term based on the keywords and not what it deems right for me.

      They are not changing the way we think, they want to control how we think (if there really is a difference)! I don’t know about you but I do not want ANYONE telling me how to think!

  • I think Mark is right, but I wonder what technologists from the early to mid 20th century might make the list too.

    PCs could be incredibly useful prior to Windows — but they required a lot of learning and work to make useful even in the 80s, despite the Mac and home office software/hardware packages sold by Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc. Still, millions of people did learn how to integrate personal computers usefully into their lives, and the learning involved made for more of a collaborative, tinkering user culture where everyone was a bit of a programmer by necessity.

    Windows just popularized the Mac GUI for which the credit really goes to Xerox-PARC.

    The Bell Labs team behind Unix and of course Linus belong on the list as well.

  • A century is a very long time and to corner yourself with such a
    small list of potentials is to be near sighted. Mark_up claims it is Bill Gates
    and yes he did do some great things but we are talking about technology here,
    not saving the world from his other endeavors. so I would not place him above
    Steve Jobs and in fact Jobs did more for the computer and how we use devices
    than Gates ever did so I fail to see how there is even a comparison to be made
    there?

    The first person to come to mind for me was and still is Elon
    Musk but I give him a far shorter timeframe before his dreams become a reality
    and what he offers exceeds anything anyone else in the tech community has even
    brought to the table.

  • mark_up

    Zuckerberg and Page/Brin made amazing websites that beat other social/search websites that existed and worked fine (MySpace, Altavista, etc). We would be getting along just fine without them.

    Steve Jobs made computers prettier and easier to use. Without him, we would be getting along just fine.

    Torvalds I would place at number two on that list.

    Bill Gates is without a doubt the most influential man on that list. Not only has he put a computer in every electrified home on the planet, he’s also literally saved millions of lives via his philanthropic pursuits (fighting against Polio, Malaria, AIDS, etc).

    “Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs. ‘Who was Steve Jobs again?’ But … there will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World,” “There’s a reasonable shot that — because of his money — we will cure malaria.” – Malcolm Gladwell

    Now if I was making such a list of my own, Elon Musk would be on it. He’d be near the top, and by the time he’s done (in 2 or 3 decades), he’d probably be at the top of my list.