I don't get it— do these people hit more often than they miss? Why do we still listen to them?
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.
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.
Great students can become great teachers without being great doers.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As it is, though, there are just a few mildly popular websites that enable that.
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.)
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.
Bad strategy IMO to make a list, though.
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.
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.
His complete lack of (aesthetic) taste might make him the anti-steve jobs though.
"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.
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.
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.
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 it may be ironic to value the importance of centralization on this topic, it's unwise to not to value it.
Downvote? Really?