Official: Steve Jobs most important man in IT

Steve Jobs, the still-interim CEO of Apple is the most important man in IT – according to Upside magazine and "industry insiders". The Elite 100 list put the charismatic Jobs top of the list, applauding him for his cockiness and marketing savvy and in particular his ability to get up Intel's nose for talking up its "bland boxes". Jobs comes one place ahead of Microsoft CEO and the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Bill, as we all know, has not had the easiest year what with the US government clambering all over him, but nevertheless, Microsoft has managed to maintain its control on all things PC and Net based. As would be expected with IT, very few of the top 100 last year make it into this year's list (in fact, just 39), and the new entrants reflect the power shifts that have taken place in the last month. So goodbye to David Filo of Yahoo!, David Bohnett of GeoCities, Ray Lane of Oracle and Eric Hippeau of Ziff-Davis. And a big hello to Carly Fiorina, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Christopher Galvin, chairman and CEO of Motorola, Rick Belluzzo, CEO and VP of Microsoft Online and Sumner Redstone, chairman and CEO of Viacom. The top 20 contained the usual suspects: Michael Armstrong, chairman and CEO of AT&T was second, Masayoshi Son, founder, president and CEO of Softbank third, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems fourth and the remainder welcomed Big Blue Lou, Sunny Scott McNealy, Michael Dell, Craig "Chip" Barrett and Jeff "The Bookie" Bezos, among others. ®