According to Business Week, Obama’s CTO will be one of these guys:
Among the candidates who would be considered for the job, say Washington insiders, are Vint Cerf, Google’s (GOOG) “chief internet evangelist,” who is often cited as one of the fathers of the Internet; Microsoft (MSFT) chief executive officer Steve Ballmer; Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeffrey Bezos; and Ed Felten, a prominent professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University.
I can’t see Ballmer taking this job when he’s having so much fun, but I imagine any of the others would bite. Trouble is, they’re mostly business guys rather than tech guys, so it’s not an elite group. I’d have to go with Felten, for the fact that he has actual technical knowledge as well as a blog. I’ve debated him about net neutrality, of course.
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Agree about Ed Felten. When I first read about the CTO idea, Felten came immediately to mind.
I don’t think Vint would take the gig, mostly because he likes his Google job too much. I kinda doubt he’d relish being a high-level bureaucrat.
Balmer is a red herring. Gates would be a more subtle name to float, though he wouldn’t take the job, either.