Is the new economy less about 'new' and more about 'economy' these days?

Tony Hallett wonders whether the current climate in high-tech places more emphasis on established businesses and managers…

It has traditionally been easy to look at silicon.com Agenda Setters polls and see who the rising stars are and for the last few years that group has to a great extent been entwined with those launching internet start-ups or taking them on to the next level. Not so this time - albeit with a couple of exceptions.

We've made the decision to exclude Steve Jobs (at 1) and Bill Gates (2) as entrepreneurs. They have clearly been entrepreneurial during their careers and are likely to be again but right now the feeling is that they're doing good jobs at running their businesses. Michael Dell (12) is also doing that but from meeting the man at the start of the year and knowing the strategy we'd say he's still breaking new ground, still fostering something of a start-up mentality. So he is an entrepreneur - we say so.

Glad to get that out the way - and it leaves us, most notably, with three leaders of companies with something very important in common: any one of them could prove to be the big IPO of 2004.

Google has been a huge success and this time the Google-related vote was split between CTO cum co-founder Sergey Brin, last year's 8 down now to 24, and Eric Schmidt, the search engine's CEO. Schmidt, a tech industry veteran famously with spells at Novell and Sun under his belt, is important now because of the flotation factor.

"Google will IPO next year and everyone will watch that because it will be a benchmark of what happens in that industry," said panellist and VC Ajay Chowdhury.

James Bennet, founder of the European Technology Forum tempered that view slightly, saying: "Schmidt is a pedigree manager, though he didn't manage to sort out Novell."

At 38 is another of Bennet's favourites, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. He, too, leads a company with a chance to be the IPO bell-wether, and then there's David Levin (17), admittedly less of an entrepreneur, at Symbian. Ditto their flotation prospects.

But meandering to the world of internet-based companies, we can see two UK-based newcomers with the X factor - hear what they're doing and it seems obvious they'll be a success. Steve Linford, at number 19, is a net hero because of his timely anti-spam crusade at SpamHaus. Richard Allan MP and panellist said: "Steve is a normal, very unassuming guy but he is really hitting the crunch legal point, finding out in real time who the spammers are."

Meanwhile, Stephen Hill at 41 runs Betfair.com, whose new business model for online gambling has traditional bookies running scared.

They are proof that there is still much room for innovation in the new new economy. There are those from the old new economy who still make an appearance, though the absence of Meg Whitman, eBay CEO (at 34 and 16 the last two years), is a mystery.

However, rival and CEO at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, makes it four years in a row - and not many other individuals can say that - at 32 and Terry Semel, CEO at a resurgent Yahoo!, is all the way up at 23. Wasn't this ex-Hollywood exec just supposed to be teeing up a trade sale or presiding over a gradual decline?

And if we're talking about entrepreneurs Google and Yahoo! then we have to mention Mike Moritz, the only VC on the list (sneaking in at 50) and partner at Silicon Valley's Sequoia Capital, who backed both companies as start-ups.

In all honesty, it's clear that being entrepreneurial is about a lot more than doing a start-up. Just ask Dell or Moritz. Or even Jobs and Gates.