After seven straight years of growth and the introduction of not one but three industry defining gadgets, you would think that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) would have grown beyond its creator. The white washed gleam of its PCs and its simple, ubiquitous logo are powerful on their own, right? Wrong.
The brand and its attendant products are synonymous with CEO Steve Jobs. The man is perhaps more closely identified with his company than any other executive in history, even eclipsing his one time partner turned rival Bill Gates and his relationship with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). How influential and vital is Gates to the Apple brand? The stock dropped 5% after it was announced that the CEO would take a sabbatical due to health reasons last January.
What’s strange is that even as CEOs at other technology companies are lauded for their company’s victories and blamed for gross missteps, few are as widely regarded as Jobs or given their due for defining the public identity of the companies they run. Sure, most know who Mark Zuckerberg is. Some even know Google‘s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Larry Page. What about the rest? Here are four CEOs from the technology industry that should be just as famous as Steve Jobs.
Reed Hastings – Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX)
Investors who’ve come along for the ride with Netflix as the stock has grown from $30 per share to over $230 per share in the past two years know the name Reed Hastings. As the man who championed the video rental company’s transformation from a by-mail DVD rental service into the face of the streaming home video industry, you’d think he would be more of a household name.
Sanjay Jha – Motorola (NYSE: MMI)
The truth is that Sanjay Jha still has a lot to prove, especially to investors. Motorola‘s mobile phone division under Jha’s leadership, Motorola Mobility, hasn’t been a homerun stock since Motorola split into two entities back in December 2010. That doesn’t diminish Jha’s achievements though. Since coming on as CEO in 2008, it was Jha that made Motorola a champion amongst mobile phone consumers again, and he was instrumental in forging the company’s landmark partnership with Google and its Android operating system.
Jeff Bezos – Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)
Amazon is almost as omnipresent as Apple in modern American life. Why then isn’t its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos a household name at this point? His achievements are almost innumerable at this point. He all but created modern online commerce; he helped make the e-reader a major consumer gadget; he is one of the few captains of a major retailer that is surviving the death of physical media like CDs and DVDs thanks to investment in digital services. He’s done it all. He’s a young, charismatic guy to boot, so it’s a mystery why he isn’t naturally associated with Amazon like Jobs is with Apple outside of business circles.
Steve Ballmer – Microsoft
The argument could be made that Steve Ballmer is almost as famous as Steve Jobs, but the truth is that outside of investors, most people still associate Microsoft with its chairman, Bill Gates, not its chief executive officer. Investors may also balk at the choice given how flat Microsoft has been as a stock in recent years. Ballmer deserves major credit, though, for redefining Microsoft as a consumer brand since taking over as CEO in 2000. The public was dismissive when Microsoft announced it would try to go toe to toe with Japanese company’s like Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Nintendo (Pink Sheets: NTDOY) in the video game market with its Xbox game player. Ballmer has made Microsoft one of the world’s biggest players in the home entertainment industry though. His most recent success, the hands-free controller for the Xbox 360 Kinect, continues to fly off shelves.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
