Here are 15 visionaries who have changed how we work and, in some cases, how we live in the last ten years.
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It is quite a task to list the most influential technology leaders of the decade in the company and beyond when you consider the huge number of innovations and events that have changed the nature of our way of working and living in those times.
Adding to the challenge, the dividing lines between B2B and B2C have become vague in many ways outside of a meaningful distinction. The widespread acceptance of ‘bring your device’ in recent years has meant that much of the technology we use in our personal lives has been merged with our working lives to the point where it is sometimes difficult to separate the two.
Whatever the case, here’s a look at the list of the most influential enterprise technology leaders of 2010, with some of the usual suspects and some flying under the radar:
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon
In essence, you can’t have a list of tech visionaries and not include Jeff Bezos, although arguably many of his achievements in the 2010s were more consumer-focused: he launched Amazon Studios in 2010, The Washington Post in 2013, and Whole Foods in 2017.
But among the men who changed the face of digital commerce, Echo released the first generation of one of the first mainstream smart speakers and introduced the Alexa ecosystem. In 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone, which flopped. Here comes the impact on the company. Amazon’s fulfillment centers use image recognition algorithms, including product type, size, and weight, to sort packages from trucks.
“What people with barcode scanners take an hour to reach in older fulfillment centers can now be done in half that time,” noted Fast Company in 2017. “This is what the future of American factory work looks like.”
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
It would be a shame to have a list of technical visionaries without mentioning the CEO of one of the most valuable brands in the world, Tim Cook. Even after Steve Jobs died in 2011, Cook continued with the Apple Watch Series 4 (2018). Since then, Apple has been experimenting with everything from advanced artificial intelligence and augmented reality to autonomous cars. The iPhone and Android continue to dominate the mobile world, and Cook has worked to turn Apple into a company that focuses on renewable energy, labor, and environmentally friendly supply chains, as well as user privacy and highly recyclable products, according to Leander Kahney, who is a 2019 graduate and has written a book about Cook.
Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
By the end of 2013, Microsoft quickly became a household name in the minds of many users and analysts who cited the failure of Windows 8 and the fact that the company was behind the eight ball in the smartphone market—only for a total failure to be seen with Windows Phone. The acquisition of Nokia was expensive and provided no value.
But Nadella took over Microsoft from Steve Ballmer in 2014, and Windows 10 was announced later that year. Since then, Microsoft has returned with a vengeance. It is open to apps on competing devices. It has launched its line of competing computers. It has made a claim in the cloud space with the hugely successful Office 365 and Azure offerings. It has even embraced Linux in addition to Windows. And finally, Windows 10 is a clear success.
Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group
With e-commerce in China, Ma is now the richest man in that country and was named on the Forbes list of the world’s greatest leaders. He was also named the 30th most powerful person in the world in 2017. Then there is the story he told about Kentucky Fried Chicken’s rejection of a job after 24 people applied, and 23 were hired—except him.
Failure and perseverance have served him well. “The lessons he learned from the dark days on Alibaba were that you don’t give up, and when you’re small, you have to trust your brain, not your strength,” said Laura DiDio, director of technical research agency and ITIC consultancy. Jack Ma announced he would resign as chairman on his 55th birthday in September. A former teacher, Ma, said he plans to return to class after retirement.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus
Oculus VR started in June 2012 in a garage in Irvine, California. According to Business Insider, the then-19-year-old Palmer Luckey launched the company on Kickstarter and raised nearly $2.5 million for his virtual reality headset. After raising an additional 16 million, Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for 2 billion in 2014.
Luckey has since left Oculus, but Facebook continues to work on the virtual reality company and is releasing Oculus for business with completely new enterprise-grade software and support for the Oculus Quest, an all-in-one VR system.
Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce
Benioff is considered an important catalyst in the rise of cloud computing by building a hosted software model on the Salesforce cloud and leading the pay-per-use model. In 2018, he orchestrated the $6.5 billion deal for MuleSoft, bringing together disparate software applications, data, and devices. Moreover, Benioff is a dedicated philanthropist, and in November, he called on every CEO to close the pay gap between men and women.
Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of Huawei
Although Huawei has been in the news in recent years due to alleged espionage in the US and Canada, the company is also innovating and making progress in the areas of servers, 5G, 6G, telecom, and smartphones. Huawei is now starting the computer game. “What they do is invest a lot in R&D; 15 to 20% of their revenue goes back to security,” DiDio said.
Although North America is currently a difficult market for Huawei, the company is penetrating the Asia Pacific region, Australia, and New Zealand. DiDio said the following countries are South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe.
Peter Sun, chairman and CEO, Inspur
Inspur ended up in IDC’s top five companies worldwide for server revenue and is China’s leading cloud computing and big data/AAI service provider.
IBM and Inspur worked together in 2014 to develop a new hardware system in which IBM provides software, processors, chips, and support. Earlier that year, Inspur joined IBM’s OpenPower Foundation, an alliance for developing Power Chip architecture.
Sun believes in the following technological revolution: AI, big data, and cloud, called “ABC”, are fundamental to the global economic recovery and will “reduce the negative impact of economic crises”.
Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM
Rometty has led the transition from IBM to a data company and has made cognitive computing at the center of its strategy for the future with Watson in various verticals. She is one of only 3% of female executives in the Fortune 500. Half of IBM’s $79.1 billion in 2017 revenue comes from the emerging, high-quality segments of IT versus its older software products.
“Her legacy is a big question mark because of IBM’s income,” said DiDio. “IBM is beaten because Watson has not delivered huge numbers, but it has only been there since 2013–14.” It is one of those things that has to germinate for 10 to 15 years when it comes to cognitive computing and AI.”
Robert Swan, CEO, Intel
Chosen to lead as the company’s new CEO in January 2019, Intel is known for its processors but has been expanded to include the cloud, IoT, memory, and programmable solutions. Swan told CNBC that he is convinced the technology giant will continue its strong performance in the last months of the year, building on its best quarter ever.
Duncan Epping, CTO, VMware
Epping is one of the most influential people in the world in terms of storage and availability, HCI, virtualization, and cloud technologies. He is a VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX007) and acts as a partner and trusted advisor for clients of the virtualization technology provider, mainly in EMEA. He co-authors several books, including the vSphere Clustering Deepdive series and Essential Virtual SAN. He is the owner and lead author of the virtualization blog Yellow Bricks.com. His primary responsibilities are to ensure that future VMware innovations connect to essential customer needs and translate customer problems into opportunities.
Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack
Butterfield started working on the Slack work chat app in 2012. The first iteration was a web-based multiplayer game that could have gone better. Fast-forward to 2013, and the Slack team knew they owned a product that other companies would use.
“We begged and coached our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback,” Butterfield said in an interview with venture capital firm First Round Capital. Slack recently raised $250 million worth of $5.1 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Accel, and other investors. Slack is now regarded as one of the leading workplace software platforms companies use to enable collaboration and communication in an increasingly digital world.
Jensen Huang, founder, and CEO, Nvidia
Since the company was founded in 1993, Huang has been CEO of the leading chip manufacturer, Nvidia. Nvidia GPU computing has reinvented modern computer graphics; it is the power of the American Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer. The company has made significant progress in deep learning and AI, and GPU deep learning has ignited modern AI, with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars.
Although Nvidia tried four years ago to compete in the highly competitive smartphone market with its mobile chip and modem, it failed to get hold of offers from competitors such as Qualcomm. So Huang returned and took part in the technology in the mobile chips for self-driving cars, according to Forbes.
“He has done a good job realizing that the parallel processing capabilities of Nvidia are ideal to meet some of the most difficult computer challenges of the next five to ten years,” said Craig Ellis, a senior research director at investment company B. Riley & Co., in the Forbes article. Nvidia now manages 70% of the PC graphics card market and saw sales rise from 41% to $5 billion in the last five years.
Meredith Whittaker, AI researcher, formerly from Google
Whittaker took a leading role at the end of last year in organizing walkouts from Google employees around the world to protest against the handling of sexual harassment complaints against senior managers. She stands out as the most prominent organizer and activist among techies, said Zachary Chase Lipton, assistant professor of business technologies and machine learning at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.
“She has taken substantive action to hold large corporations responsible, both for their ethical behavior in society and for their treatment of employees, often with a high career risk,” he said, “and has transformed the Silicon Valley power landscape with some hope to offer tech workers responsibility from their employers.”
Whittaker left Google after 13 years in July and told the Los Angeles Times that she wanted to work full-time on AI ethics and focus on ‘organizing for a responsible technical industry”. It’s clear that Google is not a place where I can do this work. ”
Andy Jassy, vice president, AWS
Forbes notes that Jassy is the power behind Amazon Web Services and manages one of the most aggressive areas in the enterprise tech world. Companies from Netflix to Spotify to Major League Baseball use the Amazon cloud to send real-time data, stream video, and more.
“Before Jassy, the idea of hiring computer power from another company was unheard of, and now these companies all rely on AWS to survive,” said Forbes. Over the past ten years, Jassy has helped make AWS more than a $14 billion company, according to Time magazine.
