NEWS
As the countdown begins to silicon.com's ninth annual Agenda Setters poll of tech's 50 most influential individuals, it is time to look back at those who held top five positions in 2007. Today we catch up with last year's number two, Steve Jobs.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been an Agenda Setters stalwart since the project's inception in 2000.
Jobs is Apple personified: the man who founded the company, left and then returned is as much a feature of the business as the tech itself.
Jobs and Apple's year has been a mixed bag. The highlight? The release of the iPhone 3G. It hit shops on 11 July and had sold one million devices a matter of days later. While the iPhone 3G may be but an incremental improvement on the original version, it's still one that's inspiring handset makers to add a slew of touchscreen iPhone-alikes to their ranges.
Jobs also inspired another trail of me-too offerings from Apple's mobile rivals with the launch of the App Store, the shop front that gives iPhone developers a chance to peddle their wares in return for handing over a slice of the proceeds to the Mac maker.
Touched with Apple's fairy dust, the store raked in $30m in 30 days and inspired a slew of similar products from other software houses.
It's not all been smooth sailing for Jobs since the last Agenda Setters list was published, though.
The Leopard OS arrived to an uncharacteristically ambivalent reaction, delivering nice-to-have tweaks rather than major improvements, and leaving users to experience teething problems including finding themselves on the wrong end of a blue screen of death.
The iPhone 3G was also dogged by bugs that prompted a software update from the company in August.
Jobs proved his marketing credentials, revamping the dead duck that was .Mac into the spiffy new MobileMe cloud storage service, a repository for Mac and iPhone users' photos, emails and other content. The service, however, suffered a series of outages after its launch, prompting Apple to give away free extensions to users' subscriptions as a sweetener.
For all these troubles, will Jobs make the list this year? There are few sure bets in Agenda Setters but despite Apple's mixed performance, Jobs remains a symbol of stylish, easy-to-use tech and marketing genius. His place on the list is a near certainty.
silicon.com's Agenda Setters panel, made up again of CIOs, analysts, VCs, consultants, lawyers, academics and other experts, convenes in September. Stay tuned for the results - to be revealed at the beginning of October.
