Eric Schmidt - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Eric Schmidt

Title: Google CEO

Position: 4    Last year: 6

Why? Continuing to scare the tech establishment

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes the Agenda Setters top 10 for the sixth consecutive year in 2009 and rises two places from his 2008 ranking as Google continues to expand its product portfolio and influence the tech industry.

Google has had another interesting year as the company announced it was developing an operating system, initially for netbooks, called Chrome. It also continued to push its Chrome web browser while the Android mobile phone OS has become much more mainstream.

Perhaps reflecting the increasing ambitions of Google, Schmidt left Apple's board of directors in August after saying the two businesses were starting to overlap too much.

And the company's core search business is still prospering, with Schmidt saying in the summer that Microsoft's renewed efforts around search with its Bing search engine were unlikely to trouble the company.

Schmidt has been a major player in the tech industry for years. Prior to joining Google in 2001, Schmidt was chairman and CEO of open source software company Novell as well as CTO at Sun Microsystems where he helped develop Java. He has also worked as a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre.

Further demonstrating his influence earlier this year Schmidt became a member of Barack Obama's US Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and was even linked to a role as the US' first chief technology officer, a position he ruled himself out of in favour of staying at Google's helm.

Of the reasons why Schmidt merited fourth spot on the Agenda Setters list, one panellist said Google "is the cloud" and its move to corporate apps is likely to be "hugely significant", potentially contributing to the demise of some established big tech names.

Another panellist added: "You don't need to search far to realise that Google is the company that more than anything is now setting Microsoft's agenda for it."