Apple CEO Steve Jobs ranks ninth on a list of the top 25 company executives as ranked by the staff of CRN, a site that “offers vital information for VARs [value added resellers] and technology innovators.” Calling him “the king of digital cool,” CRN said Jobs has “managed to raise Apple’s mindshare, if not its market share, though his quest to stay at the forefront of innovation in the PC and consumer arenas.”
“Jobs is instrumental to everything that Apple does. Nothing goes on without his assent,” says Scott Schaefer, president of Techknowsphere, a New York-based Apple solution provider, said in the report. “He is probably the most hands-on CEO of any company.”
Jobs’ ranking on the list was due to such products and services as the iPod, iTunes Music Store, Mac OS X 10.3 (“Panther”) and Power Mac G5. These products and others “have spawned a range of copycat offerings and spurred major IT and consumer-electronics vendors to mirror the ‘digital lifestyle’ concept championed by Jobs and Apple,” according to the CRN report.
Others ranked in the top 25 executives include: IBM’s Sam Palmisano, Microsoft’s Steve Balmer, Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Sun’s Scott McNealy, Computer Associate’s Sanjay Kumar, Veritas Software’s Gary Bloom, Intel’s Paul Otellini, Sony’s Hideki Komiyama, the Open Source Development Labs Linus Torvalds, Red Hat’s Matthew Szulik, the SCO Group’s Darl McBride, Logicalis’ Mike Cox, CompuCom’s Ed Coleman, Cisco Systems’ John Chambers, Check Point Software Technologies’ Gil Schwed, Symantec’s John Thompson, Tech Data’s Steve Raymund, Ingram Micro’s Mike Grainger, Synnex’s Bob Huang, D&H Distributing’s Gary Brothers, CDW’s John Edwardson, Dell’s Michael Dell and eBay’s Meg Whitman.
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