Scott McNealy

Talk about the bully pulpit.

McNealy has used the force of his personality and the wild popularity of Java to establish Sun as the archrival of Microsoft, and himself as the leader of the free non-Microsoft world. He waves Java around as the key to unshackle users from Microsoft's dominance and as his ticket to bash away at Bill Gates.

Java got Microsoft's attention. So much so that McNealy sued Microsoft for breaching its Java licensing contract by disabling the cross-platform compatibility features of the programming language.

Beyond Java, Sun remains the strongest voice for Unix computing in the enterprise and a force to be reckoned with in high-end network computing.

NT may take big chunks of the market, but McNealy isn't about to hand over the enterprise to Bill Gates, as so many other Unix vendors appear to have done.

The importance of McNealy's power lies not so much in the actual capabilities of Unix or Java, but in his ability to make users believe that life without Microsoft may not only be possible, but preferable.

NEXT: Terrance Milholland