10 people who don't matter (2006) | Hacker News Reader

10 people who don't matter (2006)

money.cnn.com

183 pointsssclafani134 comments

OOF:

In entrepreneurship, timing is everything. So we'll give Zuckerberg credit for launching his online social directory for college students just as the social-networking craze was getting underway. He also built it right, quickly making Facebook one of the most popular social-networking sites on the Net. But there's also something to be said for knowing when to take the money and run. Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer, holding out instead for as much as $2 billion. Bad move. After selling itself to Rupert Murdoch's Fox for $580 million last year, MySpace is now the Web's second most popular website. Facebook is growing too - but given that MySpace has quickly grown into the industry's 80-million-user gorilla, it's hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran.

As I remember it, Facebook didn't have wireless either, and had less space than a nomad.

I don't get it— do these people hit more often than they miss? Why do we still listen to them?

Well, if you look at the rest of the list, Zuck's the only one who really stands out as a "they sure couldn't have got that more wrong".

Netflix.

I'm not sure Torvalds should be there, either. Sure, Linux long ago outgrew the need for him as chief evangelizer, but when Linus speaks, the software world's ears perk up. He's still incredibly influential, if no longer the Atlas of the FOSS movement (with apologies to Dr. Stallman).

i dunno. Linus putting out git and reed hastings with instant both seem pretty important these days.

To the average reader of CNN, git is a piece of software they've never heard of, much less understand why it's better. Linus never stopped being important to the software community, but git doesn't make him more important to the non-software community.

I guess that just leaves starting the OS that powers most of the web.

Github is more important than git so I guess that leaves figuring out how important linus or git was to the origin of github. Is here something about git specifically that made it more suitable for github than say mercurial or bazaar? Or was it timing or happenstance?

It's debatable whether github is more important than git or not. Despite the impression a reader of this site could have that (hype and with an user interface copy pasted from the prototype hype fashion simple user interface of the moment, with Big Buttons tm included) hosted services are the best thing since sliced bread and will replace everything, the world is interestingly neither centered around that, and it's indeed very ironic to value importance of centralized services more than the decentralized tool it embraces and extend, given many of the advances in the source code management area and development workflow directly come from the decentralized aspects.

That Hg also exist does not make git less important than github, no more than the fact that sourceforge exists make github less important than git.

While I happen to think the Github UI is quite nice, it's a minor aspect of Gihub's importance. Github basically invented "social coding" which I would argue has been a genuine phenomenon unmatched by BitBucket, Launchpad, et al (or Sourceforge). Git (and Mercurial) didn't offer substantial advancements over Bitkeeper (save licensing) and Git's popularity was solidified with it being chosen for Linux. While reasonable people may disagree on the merits of Git, Hg and Bazaar, it's difficult to put BitBucket and Launchpad in Github's circle.

While it may be ironic to value the importance of centralization on this topic, it's unwise to not to value it.

Downvote? Really?

How would you define "social coding"?

Netflix CEO, Linus. Both are as relevant or more relevant than ever. Netflix is getting to be as big a force, in revenues and viewership, as any big cable company. Linux is very much still relevant in the server world and in the mobile and tablet computing world (android). And Linus' Git is growing in popularity (github?) and influence.

It's questionable whether the Vodaphone CEO is "relevant", but Vodaphone is definitely still a major competitor, they make more money than google and amazon combined.

Yes, plus Linus is relevant and important for both linux and git.

Git has been hugely, positively disruptive in a way no Dvcs was prior.

And anyone (cnn evidently) that thinks Linux developers are fungible misses the point of having a fierce, opinionated, blunt semi-dictator running the show. Great things can happen. He's the anti-steve jobs.

"fierce, opinionated, blunt semi-dictator running the show." That doesn't sound like the anti-Steve Jobs to me.

His complete lack of (aesthetic) taste might make him the anti-steve jobs though.

He has aesthetic taste, just for other things. He's the Steve Jobs of system internals.

He is the anti-Steve Jobs on the axis of closed/open systems. He is similar on other axes, which is what anti means for stuff like physic particles.

What gives you the idea he is missing aesthetic taste? You do realize that Linus (or any of the kernel devs) are not in any way responsible for the decisions groups like Gnome or KDE may make, right?

it sounds as if you didn't read the article. It doesn't say LinuX isn't still relevant - quite the opposite in fact - just that Linus has:

"Although he can claim credit for popularizing one of the most powerful ideas ever to sweep through the software industry, Torvalds's project has matured to such an extent that it's largely outgrown its illustrious creator."

I think it's fairly reasonable to say that Linux will continue on even if Linus disappeared. Same with git, for the matter.

The article was wrong re: Netflix, but the point they made - that Netflix didn't have a capable video over IP product at the time - was reasonable.

That does not make him irrelevant when he is still here. For example, the direction he "recently" gave to the arm branch (basically ordering everybody to clean up their shit immediately), will probably imply that Linux has been and will be more successful on portable devices. Would the same thing have happened without him? Maybe, or maybe not.

Assuming a cleanup is significant, yes, I'm fairly sure Google or another high-profile Linux contributor would have done the same. It's just maintenance work - necessary, but not industry changing like the initial release of GNU+Linux (as a complete OS) was.

"Revolutions" in the industry are often not the result of a big bang, but more frequently of mere accumulation of little steps. GNU+Linux has not changed anything in the industry when initially released. It was years (decades?) behind current techs at this time (but has fast taken leadership in many areas), and at first only used by hobbyist, then only used for applications with simple needs on simple hardware as a cost reduction measure, then used in more areas and so over.

And I'm far from sure that the decisions good for the long term development of Linux would be done by bigcorps if Linus went missing anyway (especially not Google). Bigcorps have bad habits (with high impedance mismatch in the context of the Linux project), like development behind closed doors, and not only time-to-the-market centered but even for some of them time-to-the-market weighting 95% in their choices. Because of that, bigcorps were the cause of the arm branch mess in the first place. Bigcorps often lead big projects that fails big. And Linux is not lead by bigcorps anyway, it's lead by peoples.

Also, the same argument could be applied to lot of people in leadership positions anyway. Maybe Apple would not be Apple without Steve Jobs, but the CEO does not matter more in lots of big companies than Linus matters for Linux. Maybe it would be very equivalent with somebody else, or maybe not, but in the meantime they are in charge, and when they do a good job, they are the ones who matter.

I'll argue that the true innovation of Linux was in the licensing, with both the development and adoption model this implied. Early Unix was distributed without a license (for numerous reasons). It rapidly spread throughout research and academic circles, but was constrained once software licensing emerged in the 1980s, and finally killed in the BSD wars of the 1990s.

It's not that Linus stumbled on some secret of technology or was smarter than anyone else doing 'Nix development. It's that he got obstructions out of the way that kept those who could contribute meaningfully from being able to do so and allowed others to utilize the results.

The end result is the innovation and technical superiority (by and large) of Linux over alternatives.

On how Unix initially emerged: there was no copyright of software (this changed in 1976), and AT&T were prohibited under a 1954 anti-trust consent decree from participating in computer equipment and software. So when Ritchie and Thompson created Unix, the company could do little but use it internally, and had no reason to prevent its more widespread distribution. Unix exists specifically because AT&T was prevented from productizing it.

7-for-10 isn't really too bad, all things considered.

They don't, not statistically anyway. Some people still listen to them because of confirmation bias, failure to understand statistics, and because there generally isn't a strong incentive for anyone to fact check such predictions after the fact.

Given that in this case out of a list of 10 there were 3 very devastatingly bad predictions I think that's pretty damning. More so when you consider that it's rare for a company to matter, so picking 10 big CEOs that don't matter should be highly biased toward correct predictions.

> More so when you consider that it's rare for a company to matter, so picking 10 big CEOs that don't matter should be highly biased toward correct predictions.

You've got it backwards. His pool for picks isn't the set of all CEOs, it's the set of all CEOs who are well known, have mattered recently, and are still working. That's a very different pool, with a very different bias.

Fair enough. But without a good comparison against random picks from the same pool it's impossible to judge the quality of these picks. Given that there were a few gimmes in the list (slashdot and vonage for example), and given the notable absence of plenty of high profile CEOs in 2006 who foundered shortly after I'm not at all impressed with this list.

Experts and pundits are actually worse in their predictions than others. In fact, ironically there is an inverse relationship between how popular an expert is and their prediction accuracy. This article explains why - http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/02/13/why-pundits...

I think there's the same dichotomy in tech journalism as there is in science journalism, perhaps other journalism as well but I'm not qualified to comment on other topic's veracity, namely, that the people who in fact understand the topics and are qualified to talk about them much more often actually work in the field and don't merely report about it.

From that nature, I am more inclined to rely on journalism for facts and overview alone, and less inclined to rely on them for their opinion than I am actual professionals in the field.

There is a middle ground for people like James Gleick and Neal Stephenson who are scholars (in the sense that they study a field intelligently and more deeply than an average layman) but do not push the field forward.

Great students can become great teachers without being great doers.

The other element is that a large portion (and probably the vast majority) of technology and business "journalism" is very thinly veiled boosterism and promotion.

And this isn't a particularly recent phenomenon, it's largely always been thus, at least for values of "always" dating to the late 1970s / early 1980s.

Idea (wo)men need to find money (wo)men, so recruit a PR agent to spread good buzz to churn up investment. There are the occasional hits, but a hell of a lot of misses. And if you're sitting on the churning dust cloud that is the expanding edge of the boom / development, there's a hell of a lot of noise and false leads.

Truly enduring changes tend to be based in deep, deep technology, most are a minimum of a decade old, if not several, and the truly good concepts are decades to centuries old (there's a reason they keep emerging: they serve a real need). Fads are often fanciful, contrived, or serve a narrow set of interests.

Unfortunately it gets really hard to detect the signal amidst all the sound and fury. Age and a solid grounding in history help more than the young might think.

Like most futurism, there's a strong incentive in this kind of journalism to publish long-shot predictions - Dow 5000, that sort of thing. If you're right, you're a genius, and if you're wrong, you're just one more wrong prediction in a very large pile.

Bad strategy IMO to make a list, though.

Speaking of tracking pundits' predictions, whatever happened to Maciej Cegłowski's website, Wrong Tomorrow? www.wrongtomorrow.com seems to no longer be up and running.

Pundits are like baseball players, if you go 3 for 10 you're pretty damn good.

In fairness, hindsight is 20/20, and it's very easy to look aghast -- or in smug condescension -- at the failed predictions of yesteryear. But how many of us would have called all of the shots on that list correctly back in 2006?

Furthermore, it is human nature to suffer from an anchoring bias when looking at a list like this one. We immediately assign more weight to the 2 or 3 "disastrously wrong" predictions in the list of 10 than we do to the other 7. Hell, we probably assign 99% of the weight on that list to the Facebook prediction. It's the most visibly and obviously wrong. So it anchors our perception of the entire list.

I doubt there's anyone out there who gets his predictions right 100% of the time. And I bet there are plenty of highly successful prognosticators with at least one or two hilariously bad calls on their track records.

I'm not defending this list or its author, per se, but just pointing out that everyone gets it wrong sooner or later. Throw enough shots at the hoop, and you're going to miss a few of them. Granted, you could certainly argue that tech journalists should shy away from the predictions game and focus solely on reporting. But where's the fun in that?

Which just goes to show the worthlessness of paying attention to prognosticators who put their mouth where their money isn't.

Perhaps, but then, the expression "caveat emptor" comes to mind. As the readers of such predictions, we should be taking these things with a healthy grain of salt.

That's the unspoken compact between the prognosticator and his audience. It's his job to make as good of a guess as he can; it's our job to keep in mind that he's guessing.

Actually, I'd be happier if I knew of prognosticators who did put their money where their mouth is. Predictions accompanied by bid/ask spreads would be vastly more useful than predictions intended for immediate entertainment (ie, all the ones the pundit is unwilling to bet on).

As it is, though, there are just a few mildly popular websites that enable that.

Well, the counterargument to that is conflict of interest. Do I really trust the predictions of someone with financial interests in the outcome he's predicting?

I think there's a place for both types of reporting in our media. You've got Seeking Alpha for financial predictions by interested parties (who will at least disclose their interests, which is nice). Then you've got the mainstream media for general, ostensibly unbiased reporting and predictions.

(Experience has taught me that getting into a debate about the presence or absence of bias in the mainstream media is a classic blunder akin to starting a land war in Asia, or going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. So I'll refrain from getting that started.)

The thing about trying to move the market by betting is that if someone calls your bs, you're ruined; and all it takes is one knowledgeable person with moderate resources (since you're putting out big odds and lots of money if you really want to influence things). Prediction markets have historically been extremely resilient against manipulation attempts.

Entertainment, it is just entertainment.

No really, what difference does it make who they judge is relevant or not? Just see that as the same as comments from sport commenters who obviously don't play. Its fun and caters to the need people have to talk about it but it has little informative value. Its not an advisory service. If your business depends on the information you get through these channels, be very afraid or start building some expertise yourself.

This this this. Part of my job is to do industry analysis to help my partner write blog posts to build our brand. After a few very painful months spent debugging crap data and models, I realized that the consumers have zero interest in accurancy or correct meaning, so we shouldn't have any either. It is all in good fun gossip.

They see traffic again on a list published back in 2006. Thats the target. Not to publish accurate stories.

As I see it - my iPod Touch has wireless and more space than a nomad. I think CmdrTaco must be a genius.

Sparing the pain of paging through the list one javascript link at a time:

     1  Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
     2  Jeffrey Citron, Vonage
     3  Reed Hastings, Netflix
     4  Ken Kutaragi, Sony
     5  Warren Lieberfarb, HD-DVD promotion group
     6  Rob Malda, Slashdot
     7  Aurun Sarin, Vodafone
     8  Jon Schwartz, Sun Systems
     9  Linus Torvalds, Linux
    10  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

i was just about to do the same! :)

I might've let it alone if the Firefox AutoPager extension had worked on it, but no.

I fucking hate that linkbait shit.

Do they do this so they can show ads on multiple pages? I couldn't tell since I'm always browsing with an adblocker on

That and simply inflating pageviews / counts / visits and user time-on-site, all of which are typical performance metrics used by websites.

Thanks.

I picked up a nasty bit of malware from an imbedded advertising on cnn.com and have since not only blocked them via adblock+, but I mark them as untrusted in NoScript. As a result, none of the links worked.

I will say, it's almost impressive that CmdrTaco (Rob Malda) ended up as #6. Having been unable to read the article the list almost implies people who have had serious influence in the past. I'd be honored to be on it (especially if, in 2006, I was named Mark Zuckerberg).

edit: clarify the advertising problem. It wasn't a link.

I'm impressed with the list actually. It's hard to create something like this- in order to be interesting you have to pick people others would consider relevant.

There are only two picks that are obviously wrong: Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg. And, it's a testament to both of them that they succeeded in challenging circumstances.

And, they did a great job picking Ballmer and Torvald. Their explanation of why Torvald is included (open-source as a movement has out-grown just his brilliance) is very prescient.

I consider Torvalds one of the big mistakes on the list. This predates the rise of git, which is more innovative (though possibly less revolutionary) than Linux.

I wouldn't even write him off today, though it's hard to imagine what else he could touch that could be as world altering as Linux and git.

Also, this was before Android, which is now the most important mobile OS. So, Torvalds' impact continues to resonate and grow. I agree with them that Linux has outgrown a single person...and so, they may have been somewhat right, had git not sprung almost fully formed from that massive brain of his.

My gut instinct to the inclusion of Torvalds was "No, that's totally wrong", but on further reflection I think it makes sense. Linux is much bigger than him now. The whole point of the list is "In the areas where these people are considered 'important', who could I totally piss off and not see too many negative ramifications?'" I just don't see Torvalds wielding the kind of power or influence to really make or break a person/business.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to besmirch Linus, I think he's pretty awesome. I'm just saying, after thinking about it some, I understand why he might be on this list.

And I don't know that I would call git innovative, per se. git wasn't the first dvcs, and it's not substantially better than some other systems (mercurial, for example). git's prevalence today is purely because it won the popularity contest, plain and simple (being Linus project certainly helped!). On top of that, while git may be a big deal for developers, git's importance to the world at large is tiny -- frankly I'd argue that github is more important than git itself.

Linux is influential not because of git or Linux themselves, but because he represents to a lot of people how to manage an open source project. And to a lesser but still very large degree, he represents how to manage ANY software project. So the management decisions he makes end up being copied across open & closed source projects around the world.

git's prevalence today is purely because it won the popularity contest, plain and simple

I don't believe that is at all plain and simple (or correct). I worked with many DVCS systems before git. git was obviously better, from the moment I first tinkered with it, and the more I understood of its internals the more obviously better it seemed. There's a reason that after years of DVCS fighting it out for turf and never really gaining any traction, git exploded onto the scene and took over a huge portion of projects. git got everything right...that's why it won the "popularity contest".

On top of that, while git may be a big deal for developers, git's importance to the world at large is tiny

Developers make the world as we know it today. And git is what developers use. github is awesome, but git is the engine to github's fancy automobile exterior.

And people buy automobiles, not engines.

This is a discussion about engines. Your comment is non sequitur.

It's the front end that the github people have created which is desirable. They could have created something very similar with Darcs or Mercurial and it would of been just as nice to use.

darcshub.com mercurialhub.com? Nah, github sounds cooler... extra points for shortness.

I take your mercurialhub and give you a hghub instead. Ooops, it's actually shorter than hghub.

github sounds cooler though, I take that. You can actually pronounce it.

The internal combustion engine changed the world. It did it by way of automobiles (and other powered machines), but the internal combustion engine, in and of itself, was required for any of that stuff to come into existence. Likewise, git is the engine for numerous things.

I'm not sure I understand how hackers can continually underestimate the impact of our own tools and technology. There are millions of developers using git today, and the ones who use git are the most important and influential developers in the world. Sometimes I wonder if nerds even realize how much impact they have on the "real world"....

It is the idea of the combustion engine, and the fact that it became technical possible to build them that changed the world. It's not any particular combustion engine, but the combustion engine industry as a whole.

Yes, the combustion engine is very important for a car, but it became a commodity.

Yes, DVCS changed the world. Git maybe more than others because of its popularity, but slowly I think they are becoming commodities. Github could function with any other DVCS and practically all major DVCS (git, mercurial, darcs, bazaar) are interoperable one with another, making the choice more personal than technological.

So did Linus have anything o do with it winning the popularity contest?

A here something about git that made it the foundation for github vs oth dvcs?

It seems like you are making the point unintentionally.

> Linux is much bigger than him now.

Linux was much bigger than him then as well. I'd agree with you that in my world github is more important than git, but in the Linux kernel development world, I believe git is what has allowed Linus to remain very involved, and manage a lot of the commits very actively without becoming a bottleneck.

In other words, I think it's git's invention that makes Linus a bad choice on this list, because that invention has allowed him to continue to maintain a lot of control/oversight over the Linux project.

It's ironic that considering Torvalds to be irrelevant in light of how "Linux has outgrown a single person" is in itself proof of his success. The reason Linux was so revolutionary was that it was built to be decentralized and extensible. I was impressed to see this acknowledged in a CNN article.

In the grand scheme of things Git is unimportant. It’s niche technology. Version control is always going to be that and that’s alright†. (This is not a dig at Git. Git is pretty much all it can be and wildly successful at that.)

—

† Apple is currently trying to bring version control (imagine quotes around that if you will) to the masses and I’m fairly certain that others will follow. I’m not sure what, if any, influence Git can have there, I really don’t think it’s going to change much.

android would have happened with or without torvalds's continuing presence beyond 2006. that's the point the writer was trying to make.

Although it's obvious they were wrong about Hastings in hindsight, I can't disagree with their reasoning (I'm guessing this was before Netflix streaming). And if Netflix hadn't launched a streaming service, it's clear that Hastings would be a nobody.

But Hastings-led Netflix DID launch streaming so I'm not sure what your point is. They would have needed to predict that for some bizarre reason Netflix would not do the obvious thing and get into streaming.

I believe I had even read somewhere in an interview that the reason Netflix had "Net" in it was because of their long term plans to move towards streaming, not because users selected movies on a website. In other words, it sounded like the founders had originally planned to focus on a streaming service.

Clearly Hastings read this article in 2006, screamed at his assistant, "Holy shit dvds are going away?!" and started up the streaming project that saved Netflix's future the same weekend.

Well played Business 2.0 Magazine Staff. History may ridicule you but Reed Hastings has one month of free netflix streaming for each of you.

Well, that's kinda the point: in predicting Hastings wouldn't be relevant, they were predicting that Netflix would not notice the decline of the DVD (or at least not know what to do about it), and wouldn't start offering a streaming service. But in fact, Hastings did see this coming, and so they started a streaming service. So the article... swing and a miss.

I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. Many of us would have agreed on Zuckerberg and Netflix on this list back in 2006 and probably on Linus as well. Some of us would have even been pretty vocal in defending Blu-ray and/or HD-DVD. Maybe at this very moment someone is not convinced that Steve Ballmer should be on the list.

The fact that 5 years later some events altered the course for some of these guys' projects doesn't negate on the arguments put forth to include them.

We already know what Hastings and Zuckerberg did to stay relevant. Torvald's inclusion is explained as being by design. That is, Linus himself is designing the growth of his baby toward as much self-sufficiency as possible. Lucky for us there was the Bitkeeper debacle and he had to pull his ass out to give us Git. Right now the kernel is at version 3.0, most distros out there (including Ubuntu) still uses something like 2.6.xx and people are nonetheless very happy. I'd say, seen from a purely Linux angle, it would make Linus a lot less relevant.

Now, something that would've made CNN look much better 5 years after posting this, would have been to moderate their zeal by excluding stuff like "But as respected as they might be for their past achievements, their best days are behind them", especially when covering the ever changing tech business.

It has been said many times, but Linux 3.0 is just really 2.6.xx+1 with a change in version numbering.

Exactly. Not to mention 3.0 has been out for less than a month. Are you really acting as if the fact that major distributions haven't switched yet is a point against it?

I can't believe in 80+ comments no one has defended Ballmer. They basically predicted his imminent retirement but in reality Windows 7 was released and became the best-selling of version of Windows ever. Also, it looks as if he has locked in his CEO position of Microsoft for years to come. You don't have to be a Microsoft fan-boy to point out this article was wrong in their future prediction of Steve Ballmer.

I think they were very correct. It's five years later, the market cap is the same (and shrunk if you account for inflation), Apple is over 100 billion dollars bigger by market cap, Microsoft was several years too late to offer an alternative to iOS and Android, Bing is still hugely unprofitable, etc., etc.

And Balmer is also probably the reason Microsoft is losing Ray Ozzie, who by all rights should have been Gates' successor.

IMHO Ballmer was never supposed to be CEO, except maybe on a temporary basis. MS needs a technologist at the helm.

Given that the userbase of personal computing devices (not necessarily PCs or laptops) is still growing and will be for a while, the point at which Microsoft offers an operating system that isn't the "best selling version ever" will be a disaster for the company.

Truth is: it's very difficult to buy large classes of equipment without buying Windows due to OEM relationships, same as it's ever been. I've got Win7 that came with my current Thinkpad, but I've booted it maybe two or three times, getting as far as logging in. Otherwise it's strictly been Debian. Haven't even bothered setting up Win7 under VirtualBox yet.

I don't know that Ballmer's been a disaster for Microsoft, or if it's just running down the Christensen "innovator's dilemma" curve, but the company's best days are behind it.

In ten years I see it as a legacy provider of business servers to late-adopting companies, ossified industrial giants, some government sectors, and, principally, gaming and entertainment. Possibly merged with Sony.

I'd guess that a few of those OEM relationships were probably a result of Ballmers dealmaking skills, so I guess he does matter?

I am not trying to argue he is awesome, he isn't, just that the list was wrong about him. There is no chance he will be considered a revolutionary but he has done an adequate job of maintaining against really strong competition.

Actually, Windows XP is the best selling version of Windows ever (maybe any OS).

From Wikipedia:

According to web analytics data generated by W3Schools, as of June 2011, Windows XP is the most widely used operating system for accessing the Internet in the world with a 39.7% market share, having peaked at 76.1% in January 2007.

These lists are always bullshit, whether they're positive or negative. They're nothing more than a few random people's opinions assembled for the benefit of easy page views.

For additional giggles, under the related articles section: 50 people who matter.

"Rank: 14

Brian McAndrews

CEO, aQuantive

Why He Matters: McAndrews is the most important adman on the Internet, and his innovations have played a big part in making the Web an effective marketing platform."

Today?

According to Google, "Quantive is now Microsoft Advertising."

Talk about also-rans.

Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion.

That'll do nicely, sir.

The real point of this is: don't turn to CNN for your technology industry news.

Don't turn to CNN for your technology industry predictions. They're fine reporting facts, but predictions are hard for anyone!

The fact that Netflix is on the list amuses me as well.

Although I love how they decided to call it both ways by putting Blu-Ray and HDDVD on there.

It is a little weird to see companies that I literally don't remember on it. Vodaphone and Vonage both ring very, very, very faint bells in my mind.

Vodaphone and Vonage both ring very, very, very faint bells in my mind

I'm afraid that's a problem with your mind, not with Vodafone.

Wikipedia sez:

Vodafone Group plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers (behind China Mobile), with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of November 2010. It operates networks in over 30 countries and has partner networks in over 40 additional countries. It owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, the largest mobile telecommunications company in the United States measured by subscribers.

FWIW, I'd argue they nailed putting both Blu-Ray and HDDVD on there.

Save some time and go all the way to the last person on the list, Mark Zuckerburg.

http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/peoplewhodontmatter/fr...

“In entrepreneurship, timing is everything. So we'll give Zuckerberg credit for launching his online social directory for college students just as the social-networking craze was getting underway. He also built it right, quickly making Facebook one of the most popular social-networking sites on the Net. But there's also something to be said for knowing when to take the money and run. Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer, holding out instead for as much as $2 billion. Bad move. After selling itself to Rupert Murdoch's Fox for $580 million last year, MySpace is now the Web's second most popular website. Facebook is growing too - but given that MySpace has quickly grown into the industry's 80-million-user gorilla, it's hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran.”

Don't discount also-rans. Google was an also-ran. In 2000, Apple was an also-ran. Microsoft was (and arguably still is) the master of the successful also-ran.

Not that it matters in all the noise here, but here's my comments on their picks:

Steve Ballmer: He got where he is entirely by riding on Bill Gate's coattails. He did and still does belong on this list.

Jeffrey Citron: Obviously a correct call now. I don't know enough to say whether I could have called this one correctly at the time.

Reed Hastings: Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but it seems like from the very minute on-demand media became really feasible, Netflix was dragging Hollywood along kicking and screaming. I'd say he should never have been on this list.

Ken Kutaragi: You can argue now about whether or not he has been influential in the last five years, but I know that at the time I definitely would have agreed with CNN on this one.

Warren Lieberfarb: CNN and I would have agreed and we would have both been correct.

Rob Malda: CNN called this one correctly. I probably would have disagreed with them at the time, and I would have been wrong.

Arun Sarin: Same as with Citron--obviously correct in hindsight, but I couldn't have called it one way or the other at the time.

Jonathon Shwartz: Obviously, in hindsight CNN called it correctly. At the time, though, I had really high hopes for Jonathan Shwartz. Regardless of how talented he may be, he was put in an almost impossible situation as CEO of Sun--too much damage had already been done.

Linus Torvalds: First, a personal disclosure--I am a huge Torvalds fanboy, and would certainly have disagreed with CNN on this one. That said, you could now make a good case that CNN got this one right. In the last five years, Linus really hasn't done anything big from a business perspective. Absolutely he has been busy creating software that people use and care about (Git and continuing Linux development). However, none of has recent activity has had a major economic impact. (Can you name an industry that's been disrupted by Git?) Even the major things that Linux has done in the last five years (Android, for example) happened without being driven by Linus. I'm going to say I was wrong and CNN was right on this one.

Mark Zuckerberg: Obviously wrong in hindsight. I'm not sure whether I could have done any better, though. In 2004 I definitely would have accepted the notion that Facebook was unlikely to be worth more than Myspace. I'm not sure whether I would have still thought that in 2006.

> Can you name an industry that's been disrupted by Git?

Well, it's certainly decreased the significance of commercial and closed-source development tools & support. It's also made the market for programer talent more transparent and meritocratic, thus potentially increasing compensation for talented developers. One would expect this to lead to shifts in the employment from other sectors into programming.

Doesn't that count as disruptive? Sure he didn't make a bundle in the process, but he did make the world a better place.

You really need to get out of the HN bubble. I could pick 10 random developers off the street and I'm guessing you'll get 1 or 2 that know what git is.

+1 on Rob Malda not mattering. Their biggest miss was definitely Zuckerberg.

This is a trite and insulting article. Saying an individual "doesn't matter"? There are very respectable people in that list, and they've all reached a very successful point in their careers. They definitely all have a lot of power to do good in the tech world, and try really hard to do so.

Maybe it's just a semantics thing...but I find saying someone "doesn't matter" is way over the top.

Thanks for posting this. By far my favorite is the Facebook versus MySpace. It's amazing how quickly things change.

One name (Zuckerberg) tells how foolish anybody who predicts future can seem. And therefore tech journos almost always do. 'Idiots just shutup' I say to them!

Another one (Torvalds) screams of insensitivity to the real impact created by some one. The journalist(s) deserves a whack in the back for this.

There are many people who do something noteworthy, and then fade away, for various reasons. Calling them out, in a derogatory manner is bad. 'Idiots just go away. Look at your loser self, in the mirror, when creating a list like this' I say again.

Most of Zuckerberg's $13 billion net worth is based on an imaginary valuation of Facebook, apparently engineered by Goldmans. There's still plenty of opportunity for Facebook to disappear into obscurity, overshadowed by the next big thing, just like Myspace, Mixi, Friendster and Livejournal.

Will Facebook have lasting impact -- like you, I'm skeptical. Is Zuckerberg great on execution, and does he matter? Absolutely.

What you say can happen. Agree with you. My main peeve is with any such list in the first place - "actors who don't matter...", 'techie greats who don't matter' etc. etc. Makes me very angry, purely from basic human feelings POV.

And its obviously a link bait - '10 people who don't matter...' easily attracts people on to read (or just page visit) '50 people who do matter...'.

I wonder how much Zuckerberg's actual, cash-in-bank worth is. Can he, as an individual, sell some portion of his pre-IPO shares for cash?

It's likely anyone who makes a "10 people who don't matter list" will look like an idiot in 5 years, because there's little insight to be gained from trying to understand the tech scene as a series of people who "don't matter" -- a poorly-defined category of people whose "best days are behind them." And the inclusion of Torvalds is bizarre, regardless of whether he "matters." Everyone else on this list is a founder or an executive, working in worlds with entirely different definitions of success.

“Ironically, the whole [Blu-Ray/HD-DVD] debate may well be pointless. There's little evidence that consumers are eager to upgrade their existing DVD collections, and by the time the latest format war is settled, most of us will simply download movies in our living rooms instead of hoarding them on little plastic discs.”

The above was a pretty accurate call, minus the surrender of the HD-DVD camp — and I love how Netflix, far from becoming irrelevant, became one of the top players in the streaming movie camp!

I think the jury is still out on netflix. They are king of the hill today, but there's lots of companies with deep pockets that want to change that.

Reed Hastings and to some extent Linus Torvalds are a bit ironic as well.

The logic behind putting hastings on the list (that Netflix would be eclipsed by VOD) is funny. I think the hook for Torvalds being on the list was uncharacteristically insightful for Business 2.0, though.

Yeah, that's why I said "to some extent" for Torvalds. Their reasoning was sound, but he's still far more influential than that reasoning predicted.

obviously these business 2.0 retards have no idea what git is!!!

Haha: " After selling itself to Rupert Murdoch's Fox for $580 million last year, MySpace is now the Web's second most popular website. Facebook is growing too - but given that MySpace has quickly grown into the industry's 80-million-user gorilla, it's hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran."

I think Ballmer at number one makes the list. Anybody trying to make a statement at any point in time about which tech products will be relevant in the future will be hard-pressed to hit better than 50%.

Microsoft repeatedly throws good money after bad, chasing the latest fad but never getting any of them completely right or, more importantly, creating any game-changing innovations to speak of. They saw Sony making the PS3 and decided they had to build a competing product and threw away billions in the process. They saw Google, and assumed they needed to build the same search engine to remain relevant. I can't believe that Ballmer has managed to stick around as long as he has, but if I were a Microsoft employee or shareholder, I would want his head to roll.

Steve Jobs might've been in this list if the article was written 10 or more so years earlier.... And look what happened instead!

To be fair to the writers of this article, M. Zuckerberg took the criticism of himself seriously and worked hard to become a great executive -- the news affected reality. One could argue that if all the press about Facebook (and Zuckerberg)at the time was positive, Facebook might not be as successful today.

Tough job making any prediction like this.

They were right about Aurin Sarin and Sony - but for the wrong reasons.

The Business 2.0 Magazine staff are missing from the list.

Also: stop trying so hard to come up with justifications for idiotic choices like Mark, Linus, etc.

> its[Netflix] raison d'etre itself - the DVD

Ha! Anyone who believes DVD is what Netflix is still about is either so far out of touch they should be banned from spreading their ignorance publicly or are on the payroll of the the dead but don't believe it yet media industry who still hopes "the Internet" will just go away.

you realize this was posted in 2006, right (which is the point)?

Nope, author(s) weren't worth paying attention to then either.

Well, folks, when you're right 52% of the time, you're wrong 48% of the time.

this just proves how fast things can change in our industry. don't be afraid of the criticism, because you never know what will happen in 5 years.

Ahh..so this is what it looks like when you have egg on your face.

Why do people keep doing this? Over and over again.

Seven out of ten isn't all that bad.

Sure, they didn't realize what a force git would become, and Zuckerberg showed them a thing or two, and Hastings/Netflix turned out to be smarter than anyone gave them credit for. But, the rest of them...yeah, pretty good calls.

Some of their 50 people who matter were stupid choices, however.

> Seven out of ten isn't all that bad.

Actually, it's pretty terrible - bear in mind that they could have picked ten (reasonably well-known) people at random, and chances are 8, 9, or all of them would be "has-beens" in four years.

These aren't merely "reasonably well-known" people. They're people who changed the world in one way or another. Though, the people who had most changed the world back then, turned out to continue to change the world...their boldest choices turned out to be the most wrong.

So, you might be right. Where they went bold, they got it wrong. Where they chose people obviously in decline (Ballmer, Schwartz, etc.), they turned out to be right...but it wasn't surprising to anyone (me included, as I remember reading this article when it was new).

ahhh !! just what it would feel like to have your foot in your mouth !!

who reads CNN Money anyway?

My favorite in the "not-getting-it" department from this list is Reed Hastings of NETflix. Way back in 2003, I remember being struck by how brilliant the name NETflix was. If I'd had the idea for DVDsByMail, I would have opened DVDsByMail.com Hastings was smart enough to call the company NETflix, which works fine for DVDs by mail, but really shines as the name of a streaming media company.

So, I find it hilarious to see people writing him off presuming he didn't have a streaming media plan. It is in the name!

Also, Linus shouldn't matter. I've met him. He's a decent guy, and that he "doesn't matter" in the way Steve Jobs does matter, is a good thing. Linux should be bigger than him... at some point if your platform is dependent on you that's a weakness in the platform.

Anyone want to deconstruct this article. These are 10 people who "you can safely snub at conferences". But by doing so you are also submitting to CNN's authority.

I can only imagine the dickbag who came up with this idea at the editorial meeting.

this article is total BS (accept for Balmer of course) it's easy to say "timing is everything" after the fact, but Zuckeberg did an awesome job. as in, series of great and innovative moves .. not just good timing. and " Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer...Bad move" Facebook made 2 bil in 2010.. what am i missing here?

You missed the (2006)

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