Steve Jobs top of the Power pops

Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs has topped a list of the 25 most powerful business people in the world.

Jobs took the top spot in Fortune magazine's Power 25 for 2007, for having "twice altered the direction of the computer industry". Apple's launch of the Apple II in 1977 "kicked off the PC era", wrote Fortune, which also praised the graphical user interface launched with the Macintosh computer in 1984.

Agenda Setters 2007 - Top 20

Find out who made it into silicon.com's Agenda Setters top 20 by clicking on the links below…

1. Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
2. Steve Jobs Apple
3. Eric Schmidt Google
4. John Chambers Cisco
5. Ashley Highfield BBC
6. Nicholas Negroponte OLPC
7. Niklas Zennström Skype
8. Diane Greene VMware
9. Jonathan Ive Apple
10.Viviane Reding EC
11.Paul Coby British Airways
12.Marc Benioff Salesforce.com
13.Emily Bell Guardian Unlimited
14.Larry Ellison Oracle
15.Jeff Bezos Amazon
16.Ben Verwaayen BT
17.Nandan Nilekani Infosys
18.David Yu Betfair
19.Satoru Iwata Nintendo
20.Mark Hurd HP

The article stated: "Along the way Jobs conceived of 'desktop publishing', gave the world the laser printer and pioneered personal computer networks." It also said Jobs deserved his place at the head of the list for the launch of the iPod, iTunes, Apple stores and the iPhone.

Media mogul and head of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch was placed at number two, in part due to his company's ownership of social-networking site MySpace, which was acquired in 2005 for $580m.

Technologists feature heavily in the top five of the Power 25. In joint fourth place are Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Fortune said, as well as having "massively disrupted" the advertising industry, the Google heads have also set their sights on "altering how mobile telephones work, fixing climate change, [and] utterly redefining the very nature of work". Google's mobile-phone efforts revolve around the ongoing development of Android, an open-source platform for handsets. The company also announced on Tuesday that it would enter the clean-energy business.

Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft, has been edged out of the top five, dropping to number seven. Nevertheless, Fortune still described him as "the iconic technologist, entrepreneur and business leader of his generation".

Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet.co.uk