By JULIE BORT AND JIM DUFFY President and CEO, Microsoft No one will ever accuse Steve Ballmer of mincing words. The outspoken Microsoft CEO confidently - while perhaps wrongly - predicted that Microsoft would emerge intact following the Department of Justice's ruling on whether the company abused its operating system market position to snuff out competition. Not shy about defending Microsoft's software pricing and licensing practices, Ballmer insists the company will not alter its modus operandi regardless of federal antitrust findings. He also lambastes industry executives, such as Sun CEO Scott McNealy, when they trivialize the role of software in computing and networking. Software, Ballmer says, is the industry's future. Would you expect anything less bullish from a multibillionaire honcho at the world's largest software company who grew up in Detroit, among the blue-collar environs of Ford Motor Co.? Ballmer's passion and leadership have become hallmarks of his tenure at Microsoft, and his energetic discipline and spirit have been infectious, Microsoft says. That's good, because spunk will be needed as Microsoft embarks on its most comprehensive reinvention in the company's 25 years. Ballmer will help lead Microsoft's ambitious development of .Net, a distributed computing architecture that puts a unified face on a variety of digital devices. His enthusiasm, passion and outspoken determination add up to powerful ingredients that will be vital if Microsoft is to succeed in this reinvention. Larry Ellison No matter how you define power, Larry Ellison's got it. He's rich, famous and successful. Is he also flamboyant? Sure. Egotistical? You bet. But Oracle remains a model of how a technology company should prosper in any economy, new or old; it's making money and lots of it. Oracles owns more than 40% of the database market, and its revenue and profits grow heavily quarter after quarter, year after year. Sure, the recent departures of two of Oracle's brightest management stars, Ray Lane and Gary Bloom, is evidence of Ellison the tyrant. But when push comes to shove, Oracle isn't just the database of the Internet, it's the right ventricle of e-commerce. This after being the left ventricle of client/server computing. Ellison founded Oracle and controls its every move. The credit is his.Bill Gates Lou Gerstner Thomas Penfield Jackson Scott McNealy Eric Raymond  Eric Raymond is an almost unwilling member of the networking power elite. A quintessential Unix techie with a huge sense of humor and a black belt in tae kwon do, he considers himself an anthropologist of the Internet hacker culture - hacker, of course, in its politically correct, disinfected definition, meaning those who are good at programming.
His voluminous writings on the topic bear that out. He's published the hilarious New Hacker's Dictionary and The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. The latter is an essay collection outlining his theory on open source code. It includes the famous essay that inspired Netscape to make its browser open source. In a nutshell, the theory is that open source software is better for the Internet because it puts the power of interconnected minds to work. That is, when developers are allowed to toy with code, they do. For Raymond, open source software remains more of a philosophy than a business strategy, although he is now a director of for-profit open source poster child VA Linux. Nevertheless, he says Linux evangelism is a full-time job, and he renders most of his speaking engagements for free. He's known for exposing open source hypocrisy at vendor companies, particularly Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. A sharp letter by him to HP's CEO Carly Fiorina, penned in October, is credited for HP's beefed-up Linux efforts. The Open Source Initiative is another of his evangelism platforms. It serves as a clearinghouse of Linux information, code and open source business theory. As a leader of this grass-roots movement, Raymond's power reverberations have been felt throughout 2000, as heavy hitters such as IBM and Sun began supporting Linux on their servers. Although he's an inspiring spokesman, that shouldn't minimize Raymond's technical accomplishments, which include a rewrite of the Usenet netnews software and volumes of open source software. He remains a programmer at heart. The rest of the 25 most powerful people in networking Main story Builders of the infrastructure Service provider commandos Network executive forces The money guySend this article to a colleague
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