Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Who Would Be America's First CTO?

Written by Erin Barker

Tuesday, October 21. 2008 at 11:25 AM EDT 1 comment

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Barack Obama has pledged to establish the position of chief technology officer position in his cabinet if he becomes president. So whom would he choose?

Well, as you may have heard, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt hit the campaign trail for Obama this week and cynical old Gizmodo thinks he has an ulterior motive: "Very possibly because he wants to be the nation's very first Chief Technology Officer," Matt Buchanan writes.

This could be too bad for Schmidt, since he's not even listed on BusinessWeek's shortlist of CTO candidates, compiled with information from "Washington insiders."

BusinessWeek's list includes:

Schmidt's coworker, Vint Cerf, Google's "Chief Internet Evangelist."
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) CEO
Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) CEO
Ed Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University

In other (campaign news):

Now everyone in the world can enjoy the magic of Sarah Palin, Silicon Alley Insider reports. Hulu LLC has apparently made some of its video clips -- the Saturday Night Live Palin parodies -- available internationally. But, Alley Insider's Dan Frommer warns, don't expect other shows to suddenly become available in other countries, since they could have more life on DVD than the SNL skits. In July, Peter Chernin, COO of News Corp, which owns Hulu with NBC Universal , said Hulu will "eventually launch international editions," but it will happen gradually.

Could John McCain's kerfuffle with YouTube, in which his campaign asked that their videos not be removed for copyright violations, inspire revisions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a letter to YouTube Inc. yesterday "asking that it immediately review users' protests about unfair copyright claims on their videos," and Public Citizen wrote both political campaigns last week asking them to reform DMCA.

Tags: Google, Hulu, Microsoft, Technology, TV, Video, Video, YouTube

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Public company CEOs = bad choice
Ryan Lawler
Staff
Tuesday October 21, 2008 1:48:50 PM

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I can't see Ballmer, Schmidt, or Bezos taking the job -- it seems like they are all too busy at their companies to want to move into a public role. Perhaps more importantly, none of those guys are really technologists, so I'm not really sure that 'CTO' would be the right title for any of them.

Even so, I can't imagine it would be good idea for a CEO at a company like Microsoft or Google to even be considered for a cabinet position. Could you imagine the uproar that would ensue if it appeared that a former executive at a near-monopoly was 'wielding too much influence' in the government?

Cerf might be a good choice based on his actual technological experience, but he's a bit opinionated. And I don't know much about Felten, although I suspect that an academic would probably fit the role better than an executive.

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