Brilliant Tech Visionaries #1

from Fortune 500 magazine 2012 enhanced by PeterCXO Wiz4.biz 4/13

AMAZON CEO. Jeff Bezos/CEO got “Booked” As history has shown, it would be unwise to bet against Jeff Bezos, a man who seemingly cares little about low margins and only about making long-term gains. He launched Amazon as an online bookstore from his Seattle garage in 1994 and transformed it into the largest online retailer in the world. He did it again with Amazon’s cloud computing services, which have become the backbone of many companies like Netflix, Instagram, & Pinterest. But his crowning achievement just may be the Kindle, a business that single-handedly pulled the book business into the digital age. The company’s latest device, the low-priced Kindle Fire, is estimated to have sold millions, undercutting Apple’s own wildly popular iPad by at least $300, and perhaps best exemplifies his strategy so far.

GOOGLE Sr VP Mobile, Andy Rubin is an Android. As Smartphones & Tablets become more prevalent, Rubin’s role arguably becomes that much more important for Google. Rubin is the founder of Android, the rapidly growing mobile operating system, which stands in stark relief to the heavily-controlled approach of Apple’s iOS. It’s also giving Apple a serious run for its money. More than 850,000 Android devices are now activated on a daily basis, and as of last February, 48% of all Smartphones in the U.S. ran the operating system. And speaking of Apple . . . .

APPLE Sr VP Design “Jony” Jive is iCool. Credit Jony with designing some of the most wildly popular devices in existence, including the iPod, the iPhone, & the iPad. Though the soft-spoken Brit arrived at Apple in 1992, it wasn’t until 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to the fold, that Jony’s career took off. His first design, the iMac G3, made consumers & competitors see, what an innovative desktop computer could look like — something that could be said of nearly every device he’s crafted since.

INTEL Israel CEO, Molly Eden Think the PC market is over-saturated? Molly wants you to think again. The success of Apple’s MacBook Air line has proven consumers still clamor for notebooks — they just want them thinner and lighter than before. Molly pushed for the PC equivalent, the Ultrabook, and even went so far as to predict this new category could claim 40% of the worldwide laptop market this year. Now as President and GM of Intel Israel, Molly is running the division largely responsible for innovation in processors. It was Intel Israel where both the Core 2 Duo chip and Sandy Bridge chips were developed and where the next-generation Ivy Bridge chips will largely be produced. Which is why it should come as no surprise that, until recently, the division accounted for nearly 40% of Intel notebook processor revenue.

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