25 PEOPLE WHO WILL CHANGE OUR WORLD ...including one president
As we celebrate 25 years of PC Pro, we count down the 25 biggest power brokers in today’s tech industry
Just as in Game of Thrones, the balance of power in the technology industry swings rapidly from one ruler to another.
When PC Pro first sprang to life in the mid1990s, it would undoubtedly have been Bill Gates sat at the top of the pile. Now, he barely clings on to a place in the top 25. Steve Jobs dominated the early 2000s, but sadly only his company and protégés live on. The “person” at the top of our list wasn’t even born at the turn of this decade.
Our handpicked power list is a reflection of the current state of the tech industry, not a reflection of the past 25 years. We’ve limited each company to one slot on the list, so if you’re wondering where Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are, they’re represented by others from their firms. Satya Nadella and Bill Gates both make our list, but the latter gains a place on the strength of his foundation, not Microsoft.
You won’t agree with all of our choices – you may agree with none of them – but if you think there’s someone who has been harshly omitted, write to letters@pcpro.co.uk and put us right.
1Alexa
It turns out the most influential person in tech is a woman – sort of.
Amazon’s voice assistant – and the others she has paved the way for – has transformed the way we access the internet in the home. Tons of overengineered, internetconnected devices attempted to invade our living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms: smart TVs, robot cleaners, the infamous internet fridge. It took a cylindrical black speaker and its near-flawless ability to converse to win us over.
Alexa’s secret sauce is that she requires no manual, no training. If you’re capable of speaking, you can work her – whether you’re a three-yearold demanding she sing Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep for the eighteenth time this morning or an 85-year-old wanting to catch up with The Archers.
Alexa now comes in many forms, of course. Smart speakers will be in a fifth of UK homes by the end of this year, according to figures from eMarketer, with Alexa accounting for twothirds of those. And she’s not stopping there: she’s being built into cars, headphones, office equipment. She really has only just started.
Perhaps Alexa’s biggest triumph is her ability to engage with and control your other smart devices. Gadgets such as smart light bulbs, thermostats and even that onceridiculed internet fridge make a lot more sense when you can interact with them by simple voice command, rather than dabbling with disparate smartphone apps. Some (rightly) object to the use of a female voice in a subservient role. We prefer the more generous interpretation that the smartest and most knowledgeable person in our households is a woman, albeit a computer-generated one.
2Elon Musk
Musk may have had his wings clipped on Twitter – following indiscretions, he has to get lawyers to pre-check businesssensitive tweets and keeps threatening to close his account – but his influence over the technology sphere remains immense. Musk’s Telsa is (if you’ll forgive the obvious pun) streets ahead in the electric car business. More than 80% of the electric vehicles sold in the US last year bore a Tesla badge. The “big” car manufacturers would be choking on Tesla’s exhaust fumes – if it produced any. Of course, Tesla is but one of Musk’s tech projects. His SpaceX project is arguably further along the path to a manned mission to Mars than NASA. SolarCity is the second largest provider of solar power systems in the US. And Hyperloop is on its way to becoming a nextgeneration public transport system.
If all that wasn’t enough to keep him occupied, his OpenAI non-profit is exploring ways to develop “friendly” AI for the benefit of human society.
Perhaps work on the “friendly AI” will rub off on him, because the biggest threat to Musk’s influence is himself. Smoking cannabis during an interview and launching a vile verbal attack on one of the cave divers who rescued the Thai football players has done little to reassure investors that this guy is stable enough to keep several major businesses afloat. But you can’t deny he has the golden touch – for now.
3Donald Trump
Safe to say that Donald was one of our more contentious inclusions. But while President Trump isn’t famed for his technical prowess, he’s already shown how much power he wields: just ask Huawei as sales of its phones nosedived following Trump placing it on the naughty step as part of his trade negotiations with China.
In the first two years of his presidency, he’s brought politics into technology like no other president before him. Trump, along no doubt with his advisers, recognises that our industry isn’t quite like steel, auto and oil; it provides new weapons (and new weaknesses) that are of great use to a politician.
So, while previous administrations largely allowed the tech industry to continue on its merry way, with Trump in the White House we can expect him to continue using the incredible power of US tech companies for his own ends. Not least, of course, using social media to secure another term in office in 2020.
4Susan Wojcicki
As head of YouTube, a position she’s held since 2014, Wojcicki was once described by Time as “the most powerful woman on the internet”. Certainly, she isn’t afraid of wielding that power or speaking out, especially about the gender gap in the tech industry (amply reflected by our list this month).
“The fact that women represent such a small portion of the tech workforce shouldn’t just be a wake-up call, it should be a Sputnik moment,” she said in a keynote for the Grace
Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. “Men have no special skills that enable them to run technology companies,” she went on to say. “There are just way more of them, and they’re more aggressive about getting to the next level.” However, this isn’t her only fight. Keenly aware of the fact that YouTube can be abused by those who want to spread messages of hate or terror, she has overseen the company’s “commitment to fight terror content online” ( pcpro.link/300terror) with the promise of “better detection and faster removal driven by machine learning”. While she, and YouTube, already holds plenty of sway in the world, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Wojcicki become the next CEO of Google – and be the most powerful person on the internet, not just the most powerful woman.
5Masayoshi Son
You may not have heard of SoftBank, but you will almost certainly know of the many tech companies it has significant stakes in: ARM, Alibaba, Sprint, Uber and the manufacturer of those terrifying robots, Boston Dynamics, to name but a few.
That makes SoftBank founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son, one of the most influential tech investors in the world – and he can afford to turn left on the plane, too. A personal fortune north of $20 billion puts him among the world’s richest top 50.
SoftBank’s name is slightly misleading. Although it’s become an investment firm, it started life as a computer parts store and magazine publisher – the Japanese equivalent of Dennis Publishing, if you like. It didn’t become a holding company until 1999, when a $20 million investment in Alibaba, the Asian equivalent of eBay, proved to be money very well spent. Alibaba is worth close to $500 billion in its own right these days.
Masayoshi used some of the proceeds to create the Vision Fund – a near-$100 billion investment pot designed to find the tech of tomorrow. That’s why Masayoshi Son recently described SoftBank as the “unicorn hunter” and plans to devote “97% of my time and brain” to investing in tech companies. If you have got a startup idea, you know whose door to knock on.
6Ted Sarandos
If one person embodies Netflix’s meteoric rise over the past decade, it’s Ted Sarandos. After joining the company in
2000 to lead its DVD – remember those? – acquisitions, he eventually moved to purchasing streaming rights and later became the chief content officer, commissioning Netflix original series such as Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, The Crown, Sex
Education and Our Planet. The secret of his success? “More shows, more watching; more watching, more subs; more subs, more revenue; more revenue, more content,” Sarandos told Vulture. It’s a formula that has gained him the sobriquet “the most powerful man in Hollywood” and, to many in the industry, he’s the disruptor-in-chief. Netflix is now estimated to be worth over $14 billion and analysts predict that it could reach the 200 million subscriber mark by the end of next year.
But there are clouds on the horizon in the form of new streaming services from Apple, Disney, Facebook, WarnerMedia and the BBC and ITV. Such rivals could cause problems for Netflix – on top of the existing challenges from Amazon and Hulu – and make things more expensive for viewers. Although we can’t see Americans flocking to binge-watch Keeping Up Appearances on BritBox…
7Sheryl Sandberg
It would be an understatement to say that it hasn’t been the easiest two years for Facebook’s chief operating officer: there was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election and an alleged attempt to discredit Facebook critics such as George Soros via a shadowy PR firm.
Sandberg was at the centre of it all and came under hefty criticism. Even Mark Zuckerberg got in on the act, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that he blamed her for the public fallout of the scandal. “I feel deeply personally responsible, because a lot of mistakes were made,” Sandberg admitted in an interview in April 2018.
“What we didn’t do until recently and what we are doing now is just take a broader view looking to be more restrictive in ways data could be misused. We also didn’t build our operations fast enough – and that’s on me.”
It has been a dark patch in an otherwise glittering career. Before joining Facebook in 2008, Sandberg was responsible for growing Google’s advertising wing – and her success continued with a surge in Facebook’s ad revenue before the controversies started to rage. And it seems that Sandberg, who is also the author of the bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, has so far weathered the storm. However, with Facebook’s controversial plans to enter the cryptocurrency market in the form of Libra, there are sure to be more challenges in the future.
8Daniel Ek
That Spotify ripped up the entire music industry is beyond question. But could it do the same for Apple’s cosy App Store profits?
Having conquered the record labels, an emboldened Daniel Ek is now taking on Apple. Spotify has lodged an official complaint with the EU, claiming that the 30% cut Apple takes on any subscriptions made through iOS apps is anti-competitive. If Spotify wins, it will not only have slain Apple’s cash cow but damaged its biggest competitor – Apple Music is primed to overtake Spotify as the world’s biggest streaming service in 2019.
Ek is able to mix aggression with persuasion. When Taylor Swift stomped off Spotify in 2014 in protest at the service’s much griped-about royalty rates, it was Ek who “went to Nashville many, many times to talk to [Swift’s] team, spent more time explaining the model, why streaming mattered”. She soon came back. Bruno Mars performed at his wedding. For a man who’s routinely accused of depriving musicians, he seems to have a good deal of personal sway over them.
Spotify’s latest fascination is podcasts, with the company investing in spoken-word content of its own and creating automated playlists for listeners that combine podcast and music. The radio business should be very worried indeed.
9Tim Cook
It’s been eight years since Tim Cook stepped up to replace the seemingly irreplaceable Steve Jobs – eight years that have seen Apple’s net income rise from just under $26 billion to $59.5 billion. The company’s products have grown more svelte, more powerful and more expensive. “We’re very simple people at Apple,” Cook said in a 2012 interview. “We focus on making the world’s best products and enriching people’s lives.” Apple has also become more environmentally friendly under Cook: last year, the company announced that all its facilities would run off renewable energy alone. “We want to leave the world better than we found it,” Cook said in 2014. Meanwhile, the company’s commitment to privacy is a breath of fresh air in an industry dogged by scandal. “We see privacy as a fundamental human right,” Cook explained in a recent interview. “And we’re very worried that the place that we’re all in right now is a place that has dire consequences.”
Yet, there are signs that things aren’t entirely cosy in Cupertino. The fact that users are holding onto their iPhones for longer led to a dip in revenue and Apple’s consistent failure to win over Chinese users will have furrowed brows in Cook’s court. The loss of Sir Jony Ive – the British brain behind the look of the iPhone and iMac – as chief design officer also marks the end of an era.
10Daniel Zhang
It’s fair to say that Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba has a flair for the dramatic. Exhibit A: outgoing executive chair Jack Ma, the richest person in China, dancing to Michael Jackson at the 2017 Annual Party (watch the routine in all its cringy glory at pcpro.link/300ma). Exhibit B: the company nickname of the incoming boss, Daniel Zhang, which roughly translates to the “free and unfettered one” and is also the title of a martial arts novel character.
Judging by his career so far, Zhang certainly isn’t fettered. He’s the man behind the world’s biggest sale, Singles’ Day, which is held on 11 November and netted $30.8 billion for Alibaba alone in 2018. It makes Black Friday look like a car boot sale. “In the world of business, the excitement never ends, the competition never ends,” he said in an interview last year. “You must keep awake every minute; you need to keep your eyes open in your sleep. You must keep learning and innovating.”
Keeping your eyes open isn’t a bad idea: the recent trade skirmish with the US rattled business on both sides of the Pacific, while Alibaba’s domestic rivalry with Tencent shows no signs of abating. There’s also the question of personality: Zhang taking over from Ma has been likened to Tim Cook succeeding Steve Jobs. Both Ma and Jobs were charismatic leaders, while Zhang and Cook are seen as more pragmatic. Still, that didn’t seem to do Apple any harm…
11Stewart Butterfield
Slack arrived four years ago promising to kill business email. It didn’t. In fact, just recently it launched a series of plugins for Microsoft Office to help you move you email back and forth from the collaboration software.
Yet, if Slack failed in its initial mission, it certainly hasn’t failed full stop. Slack now has more than ten million daily active users in more than half a million businesses, including around two-thirds of the Fortune 100. And while the vast majority of
that userbase is on the free tier, the company recently posted revenues of $400 million – a jump of more than 80% year on year. That might explain why its recent direct listing, predicted to be a disaster by some financial sages, saw the company’s share price immediately soar above the expected $27.
Founder Stewart Butterfield is one of that rare breed of tech entrepreneurs with more than one massive hit to his name, having also co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. That makes it somewhat surprising that Butterfield is not a software engineer – he majored in philosophy – but associates claim he has a “perfectionist’s eye”, which has led to inevitable comparisons with Steve Jobs.
“He’s the sort of person who, if he’d lived in the Middle Ages, would have produced the perfect leather bag, with just the right stitching — he’s a craftsman,” Mamoon Hamid, a fellow Slack board member, said of him recently in the FT.
12Jimmy Wales
Alongside Tim Berners-Lee ( see opposite), Jimmy Wales has become the internet’s conscience. He’s fought hard against threats to net neutrality, free speech and government overreach – and he’s not afraid to use Wikipedia’s enormous presence to make those points. For instance, Wikipedia was one of the high-profile sites to switch off for a day in protest at the US Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012, and Wales was among the signatories of an open letter lambasting the European Copyright Act last year.
Recently, though, it’s Wales’ political beliefs that have rarely been out of the spotlight, especially his vociferous opposition to Donald Trump (“He’s played the entire world. We have to give him some kind of perverse credit for that,” Wales told Business Insider) and fake news. In 2017, he launched WikiTribune, a site that aimed to provide accurate, impartial and fact-checked news. It’s had a rocky start, with substantial losses and a round of layoffs in October 2018.
Still, Wikipedia remains an iron horse. With 15 billion monthly page views, it’s the internet’s
de facto fact-checker.
13Satya Nadella
“Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.” As a statement of intent, it never quite worked for Iain Duncan Smith, but it certainly has for Satya Nadella. In 2014, he became only the third CEO of Microsoft, and in the space of five years he’s transformed the culture of the company from bully boy to progressive partner.
Much of this, some might argue, was borne of necessity. Sure, Windows is still the world’s dominant PC and laptop OS, but it no longer owns the computing platform: ownership has instead spread to Apple and Google via phones and tablets, while Linux is now more popular than Windows in the lucrative world of servers and cloud services.
It took Nadella’s background and vision to appreciate that this trend was only going to grow, and he’s likely to continue leading Microsoft for at least the next decade. Where will he take the company? Even he probably doesn’t know, but we don’t question his determination or his openmindedness.
14 Demis Hassabis
While most of us would be quite happy if we achieved master standard at chess, aged 13 no less, or led the development of AI for breakthrough “god” game Black & White, Hassabis had greater ambitions. Having left games development for scientific research, specialising in neuroscience and AI, he was one of DeepMind’s three founders in 2010.
For those unfamiliar with this British success story, its aim is to build artificial general intelligence ( see Max Tegmark’s profile for more on this). Unlike Deep Blue, then, it wasn’t only there to beat grandmasters at chess but to learn from its own experience, becoming the first AI system to defeat a world champion at the notoriously complex game of Go.
With Hassabis’ background in neuroscience, and the backing of Google (which bought the company for £400 million in 2014), DeepMind looks set to harness AI’s power in the fields of health and research over the next 25 years. Let’s just hope he isn’t working on a secret side project, because if there’s one person who can build Skynet, it’s probably Hassabis.
15Margrethe Vestager
“Who?” we hear you cry. But companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google will know exactly who Vestager is: in her five-year tenure as European commissioner for competition, she’s led a successful antitrust investigation against Google/Alphabet, ordered Amazon to pay €250 million in back taxes and hit Apple with a €13 billion fine for its dubious Irish tax arrangements.
And it’s not just about money or corporate structure. Vestager, with Lutheran ministers as parents, has a level of determination to match her sense of morality, and with her in place all the big tech companies will know that their every move will be watched – hers is a presence that acts as a deterrent against future sins.
There are question marks over how long Vestager will stay in her current position, with a new European Commission president only just installed, but if she carries on for another five years then we expect US firms in particular to face ever more scrutiny.
16Tim Berners-Lee
How much influence will Tim have over the next 25 years? On the surface, it might seem that his work is done; time to don some slippers and smoke a satisfaction pipe, what with creating the World Wide Web and all. Not yet, though, as we think that he – along with the likes of Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales ( see opposite) – will act as the conscience of the internet.
It helps that he has neither tied himself to one corporation nor sought riches. Rather than make money from the web, it was he who set up the World Wide Web Consortium (which he still co-leads) to act as standards creator back in 1994. Ever since then, he’s been a key voice in his quest to ensure the web is a force for good, whether that’s backing net neutrality or drives to keep the internet affordable.
His keen sense of morality is exactly why he created the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009. Here, he wanted to use the web to “leverage the web as a medium for positive change”, no doubt as a backlash against the growth of companies such as Facebook and Google making such gargantuan profits from our data.
That trend isn’t going to disappear and over the next 25 years we’re going to need public figures such as Berners-Lee to take a stand so that companies (and governments) don’t trample over our digital rights.
17Lei Jun
Last year, Xiaomi was the fourth biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world – behind Samsung, Apple and Huawei. Even more impressively, it shipped 32.2% more phones than the year before, despite the wider market contracting by 4.1%. In fact, demand for Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 9 series phones was so high that the company could barely keep up.
At Xiaomi’s helm is its founder, Lei Jun, who has already earned comparisons to a certain Mr Jobs. But it’s not just him: the company’s smartphones, as well as the minimalism of its Mi Stores, also bear a passing resemblance to Apple’s. But that’s where the similarity ends. For Lei Jun, the emphasis is always on making his products affordable: “What I want to achieve is that when consumers buy the product, they can close their eyes and buy,” he said in an interview last year. “It’s absolutely of high quality and absolutely at a very low price.”
And there’s plenty of choice: alongside smartphones, Xiaomi makes TVs, VR headsets, fitness wearables and even vacuum cleaners. And, having previously focussed on markets such as Russia, India and Indonesia, the firm has now expanded into Europe – the US will have to wait. However, Lei Jun is clear that domestic sales come first, with the company having recently experienced an internal slump: “Only by winning in China can we win in the rest of the world.”
18Satoshi Nakamoto
Nakamoto may be technology’s Scarlet Pimpernel, but the influence of the Bitcoin and blockchain technologies he created continue to reverberate.
Not convinced? Take the recent launch of Facebook’s very own cryptocurrency, Libra. Not only is it another huge step towards legitimising blockchain-based currencies on a global scale, it sent the value of the ever-volatile Bitcoin soaring, before crashing back by 30% in the fortnight that followed.
Perhaps the biggest winner and loser of Bitcoin’s fluctuations is Nakamoto himself. He has between 700,000 and a million bitcoins in his wallet, which would have pushed him into the world’s top 50 richest people during Bitcoin’s peak in 2017. However, he’s never cashed in a penny of the bitcoins and it’s assumed he never will. It would certainly plunge the currency into a new crisis if he attempted to offload his entire holding, although opinion is divided on its true value. US economist Nouriel Roubini recently tweeted Bitcoin would hit “zero in due time”, and he’s correctly predicted more crashes than Murray Walker.
The media hunt to unmask Nakamoto seems to have foundered. Newsweek’s uncovering of the bewildered-looking Dorian Nakamoto – a Japanese/American software engineer living in California – is the closest anyone’s come, although it’s widely believed they got the wrong man. Another of our top 25 – Elon Musk – was once fingered as
Nakamoto by a former SpaceX intern, although it seems Musk’s addiction for publicity makes him the most unlikely secret billionaire yet. He wouldn’t need the bitcoins, mind…
19You
Bet you didn’t think you were going to make our list, did you? But you, as part of the wider community of internet users, have never had so much influence, either as an individual or collectively.
Twitter, for example, gives you a real-time direct line to power brokers, such as politicians, business leaders and celebrities. You might only have a tiny chance of generating a reply or even being read in the first place, but it happens.
Sometimes you don’t even need to engage the influencers directly – they come to you. When Nick Harvey (@ mrnickharvey) posted a video of his dementia-suffering Dad playing one of his own compositions on Twitter, he was soon inundated with worldwide media requests, and offers to record a charity single for the Alzheimer’s Society, with famous musicians such as cellist Peter Gregson offering support.
Twitter and social media also hands you the collective power to end or derail people’s careers when they step over the line. Ask Danny Baker. Ask Roseanne Barr. Ask Josh Rivers.
Social media also brings out the worst in some of you – or at least a side that was once confined to hushed conversations in the pub. Barely a tweet passes from a well-known figure without the replies spewing over into antiSemitism, homophobia, sexism or death threats. Power without responsibility was the accusation traditionally thrown at us in the print media – you lot have taken it to a whole new level on social media.
20Bill and Melinda Gates
“These days I spend a lot of my time thinking about how technology can help the poorest people in the world improve their lives,” wrote Bill Gates in a recent blog. “It’s been a big focus for me since before Melinda and I launched our foundation. But looking back, I think I could have started down this path even sooner than I did.”
He may be being a little hard on himself there. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now almost 20 years old and its work has been substantial, with more than $21 billion spent on projects such as sanitation, the control of sexually transmitted diseases and agricultural research in some of the world’s poorest regions.
25 years ago, Windows alone would have earned Bill Gates a place at the top of this list. His influence on the “tech industry” these days is diminished, arguably negligible, even if he does remain on the board at Microsoft.
Nowadays, his and Melinda’s influence comes in funding and promoting technology projects that do incalculable good. Another recent blog post talks about how he met with researchers who are working on a new means of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease – not through blood tests, but by using a computer to analyse a person’s speech.
“We don’t know yet if voice analysis will work,” Gates concedes. “It’s still early in the research process, and we don’t even know what changes in speech patterns we’re looking for yet… but I’m excited about a potential future where identifying your risk of developing Alzheimer’s is as simple as an app on your phone that you can instruct to listen for warning signs in your speech.”
21Max Tegmark
“I want to avoid this silly carbon chauvinism idea that you can only be smart if you’re made out of meat,” said Max Tegmark, in his brilliant 2018 TED speech.
The MIT physicist and author spends an awful lot of time thinking about AI. Indeed, he set up the Future of Life Institute – with fellows such as Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, the now departed Stephen Hawking and (curiously) Morgan Freeman – to think through how we would should manage the development of AI.
Tegmark believes that within decades we will have reached AGI – artificial general intelligence – where computers have the capacity to learn and understand any task that we’re capable of. Before we get there, we need to work out what kind of future we want to live in and how we ensure the machines don’t elbow us out of the way.
Tegmark warns that we’re in danger of sleepwalking into an AGI future. As he points out, we learnt from our mistakes with fire by inventing fire extinguishers and invented seat belts and airbags to correct errors in the development of cars. “With more powerful technology like nuclear weapons and AI, learning from mistakes is a lousy strategy,” Tegmark explained.
With Tegmark and co looking out for us, we’ve got a better chance of not becoming slaves to the machines.
22Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones
Modern-day Orwells, Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones’s Black Mirror series confront viewers with a grim warning of where
technology is headed if left untamed. By showing us where we could go wrong, it’s starting a debate about ethics and technology with an audience that no academic could ever hope to reach.
Originally broadcast on Channel 4, the switch to Netflix has turned Black Mirror into one of the world’s most-watched TV series. It’s compulsive viewing, one of the few shows on TV these days that actually does manage to make viewers put down the “black mirrors” that it rails against.
Black Mirror’s success lies in depicting a not-too-distant future that is entirely conceivable. The woman in season 3’s episode
Nosedive who can’t attend a friend’s wedding and eventually loses her home and job because she’s not sufficiently liked on social media. Season 4’s Arkangel, where a paranoid mother is convinced to inject a tracking device in her daughter, which she secretly uses all the way through to adulthood. Or the recently released season 5 opener, where two heterosexual male gamers find themselves falling in love with one another in a hyper-realistic VR game.
It’s brain food with high production values. And Brooker’s the only one of our 25 to ever work for PC Pro – right back in issue one as a fledgling games writer (we’ve republished his review of Tie Fighter on p123).
23Eben Upton
One of the few Brits on our list, Eben is well-known as co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi. To be precise, he’s a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd, and while he doesn’t have carte blanche to do whatever he likes (there’s still the Foundation’s trustees to answer to) he still wields phenomenal personal power. Fortunately, much like Spider-Man, he uses those powers for good. With education as his driving passion, his products are helping the UK to generate a new generation of coders while delivering a platform for tinkerers of all ages – including our own Paul Ockenden, who often writes about the Raspberry Pi in his monthly column ( see p113). And while the Pi steals the headlines, Upton is also the driving force behind the Foundation’s publishing arm – importantly, all the books and magazines it produces (now including our former sister publication, Custom PC) are also “open-sourced” as freely downloadable PDFs.
The end result? Ultimately, the removal of barriers so that anyone, anywhere can use their coding brain to create. Great for Britain and the world as a whole.
24DJ Koh
It’s not often you hear the boss of a global giant such as Samsung admit he got it wrong, but it was DJ Koh who recently held his hands up for Samsung’s folding phone debacle. The handset was withdrawn before it even went on sale after early units sent to reviewers were easily broken. “It was embarrassing,” Koh admitted in an interview with The Independent. “I pushed it through before it was ready.”
If it was a genuine mistake by the president and CEO of Samsung Electronics, and he didn’t just throw himself under the bus to save his team’s blushes, it was a rare misstep. He’s largely overseen the development of the Galaxy handset range which has gone on to become the biggest selling brand of smartphone in the world.
That said, it was Koh who was also forced to apologise after the overheating Galaxy Note 7 issue, which resulted in the entire handset being dropped. Koh certainly won’t want a third strike against his name.
25Philip Jansen
After succeeding Gavin Patterson in February, BT CEO Philip Jansen has had a lot on his plate: announcing the closure of 270 BT offices around the country – including its iconic St Pauls’ base – to save £1.5 billion, inheriting plans to lay off 13,000 workers over the next few years and unveiling a new logo to howls of derision.
So what’s going right for Jansen? BT has announced that it will launch 5G services in 16 cities around the country by the end of the year and, in a bid to improve staff morale, it will hand out £50 million-worth of shares to its employees, beginning in July 2020. “I’m asking our colleagues for their commitment to making BT a national champion,” Jansen explained.
Jansen’s influence comes from BT’s ubiquity. Helped by the government, it has become the national broadband infrastructure firm and many are looking to BT to become the national champion Jansen speaks of, not a national embarrassment. Jansen’s promise to install full-fibre broadband in 15 million homes by the “mid-2020s” is a start, but we need BT to become more ambitious – or get off the pot.