IT Celebs bracket game: Meg Whitman vs. Eric Schmidt

It is time for May Madness. As part of our 25th anniversary, the Network World staff has selected 32 of the top innovative minds in the technology industry in the past 25 years. It is now up to you to determine who moves onto the next round and is ultimately named the most innovative tech exec in the past 25 years. There will be a daily poll pitting industry execs against each other. Winners will advance to the next round. Today’s match up is California-governor-wannabe Meg Whitman vs. the most famous ex-CEO-ever, Eric Schmidt.

EBay’s Meg Whitman looks to rebound from a loss in the California governor’s race last year while pouring millions of her own money into the campaign. She ran for the GOP and spent $144 million total of her money out of $178.5 million spent in total on the campaign, according to Wikipedia. Whitman once famously said, “Most of us can’t even begin to imagine.” But Whitman can imagine. She will always be respected for taking an online flea market auction site and building it into one of the Web wonders of the world.

But does she have the stuff to take out Google’s Eric Schmidt?

Schmidt is probably the most famous ex-CEO ever. As Buzzblog blogger Paul McNamara put it, Schmidt made the greatest career move in the history of careers when he left Novell for Google. His reign at Google was the stuff of a George Orwell novel. Google began with the mantra “don’t be evil” and is now a company who is increasingly under governmental scrutiny for things like allegedly collusive employment practices, spying on citizens worldwide for its street view maps, collecting location data in cell phones and just generally kicking privacy in the stomach then throwing it down the stairs. I know I’ll forever remember Schmidt as the man who, when asked to clarify Google’s privacy policy and whether users should be concerned about sharing so much information with the search giant, famously said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” In April, Schmidt became ex-CEO of Google, too, when co-founder Larry Page took over the job.

Next up: Steve Ballmer vs. Ray Ozzie