Hot industries tend to attract the world's best and brightest, and these days there are few industries hotter than tech.
From
silicon valley to silicon roundabout, some of the world's smartest with some Indians ,
most talented people are building the future - and if we had the cash,
we'd hire the very best of them and take over the entire universe.
So which tech titans would make the most amazing tech firm of all time?
These are our nominations for the tech industry's smartest operators and biggest brains: let us know yours in the comments.
As
Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook turned what Fortune called
"the atrocious state of Apple's manufacturing, distribution and supply
apparatus" into the extraordinary and extraordinarily profitable machine
it is today. He may not have Steve Jobs' vision thing, but that's okay,
because our next two nominations have that in spades.
Many
pundits see the Amazon founder and CEO as the spiritual heir to the
late Steve Jobs, and while he may lack Jobs' showmanship he has a
Jobs-esque ability to see into the future - and he uses that ability to
dominate markets before most people even know they exist. Amazon
dominated bookselling, then online retail; the Kindle did for ebooks
what the iPod did to music; the Kindle Fire is outselling Android
tablets by an enormous margin, and Amazon Prime is almost a religion in
the US.
One
of the most influential and imitated designers the world has ever seen -
his original iMac even influenced toasters and sex toys - Jonathan Ive
is responsible for an incredible range of stunning hardware. To have
just one of his creations on a CV would be pretty impressive, but Ive's
been in charge of the design for every Apple product since the late
1990s: the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air... The
Daily Mail called him a "design genius", and like everything else in the
Daily Mail, that is absolutely true.
Google's
20th employee is one of the sharpest executives in Silicon Valley, the
youngest member of Google's executive operating committee and the
youngest woman ever featured in Fortune magazine's annual Most Powerful
Women list. Mayer is famed for her ability to spot, implement and
improve bright ideas, and after years in charge of management and design
for Google's many products she's now Google's vice-president in charge
of local, mobile and contextual services.
Joichi
"Joi" Ito's many hats include chairman of Creative Commons, director of
the MIT Media Lab, Mozilla board member, venture capitalist, human
rights activist, World of Warcraft guild master and being one of Foreign
Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. Ito's many interests and
fierce intelligence means he's particularly good at the big picture
stuff: not just technology, but technology's place in the wider world.
Has
anybody in the technology industry spread more joy than Shigeru
Miyamoto? The gaming legend's CV includes Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend
of Zelda, Star Fox, Pikmin and Nintendogs, and he's variously been
called the guru of gaming, the father of modern videogames and the god
of the videogames industry.
Forget
Mark Zuckerberg: Sandberg is the brains behind Facebook, where she
"oversees the company's business operations including sales, marketing,
business development, human resources, public policy and
communications." In other words, she runs the place. Mark Zuckerberg may
have built the site, but Sheryl Sandberg made it into a billion dollar
business that's well on its way to having a billion members.
The
plain-speaking former Microsoft man co-founded Valve, the publisher
responsible for triple-A games including the Half-Life series, Team
Fortress and Portal. Its incredibly profitable Steam service means that
Valve is tremendously rich, but Valve's really impressive achievement is
to make all that money while being almost universally adored among
gamers.
According
to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, Google paid Sundar Pichai "tens of
millions of dollars" to stay with Google instead of jumping ship to
Twitter. That was probably a bargain: under his watch, Chrome has gone
from zero to hero, overtaking Firefox in market share in late 2011.
That's a tremendous achievement, and it took just three years.
The
multi-award winning chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com calls himself "a
student of Steve Jobs", but he's come a long way from his days writing
assembly language for Apple: quick to spot the potential of cloud
computing, Benioff declared war on traditional software and built a $16
billion business. His eye's on social media now, with tools to help
firms communicate internally, spot potential customers and mollify angry
existing ones, and he also pioneered a model of philanthropy called the
1/1/1 rule: employees contribute 1% of profits, 1% of equity and 1% of
working hours to the local community. Other firms, such as Google, have
followed Benioff's example.
