Zeroes, ones and shameless empire-building

The great computer empires of today started in the dreams of young men - Bill Gates was very young when he embarked on his course, and Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started by hawking 'blue boxes' around campus to make money to buy computer parts with.

The blue boxes played tones that connected you to international phones for free - pretty dodgy. Nascent 'hacking', then, also known as phreaking.

Because of this young man legacy of the modern computer giants, the present day personalities can sometimes loom larger than their creations.

Sun Microsystems' chairman Scott McNealy, calling himself a 'crusty old guy' told the BBC earlier this year that he didn't like computers. He also doesn't believe in social networking websites and would rather be out playing golf and drinking beer in a pub with mates.

Yet McNealy's company creates a large proportion of the servers used across the world's internet. McNealy says Sun's big strategy is to share, and Sun has recently started putting its code into the Open Source community, saying it's lowering Sun's cost of engineering.

Bill Gates recently bid a teary farewell to the Seattle software behemoth he helped create. Gates changed the world by putting a PC on almost every desk. For a computer geek he proved himself a sharp operator to the point Microsoft has had to fight battles on monopolisation issues.

However, Gates manages his extremely big fortune well, spending money and time on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest charity.

His replacement, the excitable Ballmer (52), a Harvard University classmate of Gates who joined Microsoft at Gate's behest, got choked up too as he tried to describe Gates' impact on the company and society at large. Ballmer is another larger-than-life figure; one with bounding energy. He inherits Vista and will have to head any new direction Microsoft heads for.

Gates was the middle child of a prominent Seattle family, but Ballmer is from 'Motown' - Detroit. His parents didn't even go to college, apparently.

Perhaps Microsoft has been handed off to the right person - you would have to believe so.

In the case of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the man who invented the Apple I in 1976 - Wozniak is widely regarded as a design genius. He got the mouse down from over 20 parts to just a few, making it viable for mass production. The rest is history.

Mr Wozniak is an affable bloke now divorced from the inner machinations of Apple. He is said to spend his time, energy and money on good causes, including schools, in the US. Occasionally he surfaces with an opinion about tech or where Apple is heading, but mostly he keeps his head down.

I met him briefly a few years ago when he was in Auckland and he said that he and a few friends had been ready to move to New Zealand in the late '80s because they were so enthused about our anti-nuclear stance.

I asked him what stopped it - he said it was when he realised there was no branch of Apple here.

Steve Jobs, Apple's messianic CEO, is widely regarded as an ego-driven professional relentless in the pursuit of what he decides people need in the way of Apple hardware and software. It has been his singular vision driving Apple along for the last decade - by contrast, Apple without Jobs was like a rudderless ship. Things got so bad, even I considered going to a PC in the mid-nineties.

But he came back.

Having such a powerful figure at the helm begs the question: what happens when he's not?

Verizon boss Ivan Seidenberg recently vented a little spleen about Apple to the Financial Times.

Verizon is the second-largest US telecoms company, and the fifth-largest in the world. When it was raised that it's Apple that's turning the mobile internet into a user-friendly reality via the iPhone, perhaps the fact that Apple had struck an exclusive network deal last year with Verizon's smaller rival AT&T had stuck in Seidenberg's craw.

He described Apple as a 'great company', then highlighted its small market share of global handset sales. He scoffed at suggestions the iPhone is about to become a mass-market handset because Apple has accepted mobile operators' pleas to subsidise it.

But then Seidenberg, who is older than Jobs said: "Steve Jobs eventually will get old."

But yeah, that is a worry. The health of Jobs is such a concern to hard-out Apple fans that a paroxysm of fear went around the Apple 'net after WWDC - why? Because Jobs looked thin. Crikey.

No plans, though, from Jobs (that I'm aware of) to retire and spend his munificence beneficially. But what if he went? Who's waiting in the wings?

Wanted: uncompromising egomaniac with a vision, good at presenting.

Any takers? Oh yeah - you can't put battery compartments in iPods though. It spoils the look.