Leader: Our election, your vote against Microsoft?

In the wake of the US presidential elections, silicon.com today revisited a recent ballot of our own - the Agenda Setters 2004 poll, in which a panel of industry experts voted on who they think are the 50 most influential individuals in high-tech.

As part of the project we asked readers to vote on which of the 50 they would choose for the top spot, which on the official poll was won by Ashley Highfield, director of new media and technology at the BBC.

Readers picked some better known names - Apple CEO Steve Jobs came in at number 1 with 39.8 per cent of the vote, followed closely by Linux creator Linus Torvalds with 38.2 per cent.

Continuing the trend set by this top two, with the exception of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates at number 5 the nine winners all challenge the status quo.

Jobs and Apple VP Jonathan Ive are arguably the most established of these - both have big offices and receive fat paycheques - but whatever you think of Apple it is putting up a good fight against Microsoft in the consumer arena.

The open-source community is by definition anti-establishment as it advocates - gasp! - giving away control of the very sort of product everyone else is holding dear, to make a bundle.

Torvalds was the obvious choice but not the only representative from open source. The readers' top 10 included Bernard C Soriano (3), the man who recommended to Governor Schwarzenegger that Caifornia use open-source software; Marten Mickos (4), CEO of MySQL, the company behind the popular open-source database; and Richard Stallman (6), the free software advocate.

The list was rounded out by academic and computer algorithm guru Donald E Knuth - whose work is being used to fight software patents - and Skype CEO Niklas Zennström - whose company is taking on incumbent telecoms companies.

So is it that our readers are simply anti-Microsoft because they dislike the company's products and practices (though smart enough to recognise Gates' influence and so include him on the list)? Or that people just like to root for the underdog, which in the tech industry essentially means rooting against Microsoft?

You're our readers - you tell us by posting a Reader Comment below.