 No. 7 Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft
Last year's position: 2
The man whose name is synonymous with high tech throughout the world, Bill Gates is still hugely influential but is the company he founded in 1975 losing its utter dominance? Gates, down five positions from last year, is tied with Linux creator Linus Torvalds in a move that shows our panel's belief that the open source threat is very real indeed.
Gates, the public face of Microsoft, is the one with the political clout and who holds forth on the company's visions for the future - whether that be seamless computing, the much-awaited Longhorn OS or the promise of 64-bit chips.
With Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer absent from this year's poll, our panel made their call that the chairman is the one calling the shots in Redmond.
Though Microsoft creates the software most often afflicted by viruses and targeted by hackers, Gates continues to make security an agenda and even scored a major PR coup when the company's $250,000 bounty for virus writers led to two arrests - including Sven Jaschan, who appears on our list at number 19.
This year Gates also renewed sparring matches with Steve Jobs and has been caught looking over his shoulder - he followed Apple into the digital music market with the MSN Music Store and played catch-up with Google with a renewed commitment to search.
The year ahead holds an antitrust appeal in Europe, a possible assault on the desktop antivirus space and pressure for Microsoft to stick to its product roadmap - through all of it, Gates will be the one to watch.
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