And in our richest field yet, that's taken some doing...

One of our panellists summed it up best, immediately after this year's Agenda Setters debate finished. He said: "It's just a game we're playing and today those were the rules."

Of course he is right. silicon.com's annual Agenda Setters poll takes some basic criteria - influence across high-tech and longevity - and simply asks which individuals rate higher than others.

A game, yes. But a good one. You can read this year's full top 50 here but the highlights must surely be:

• Bill Gates making it to number 2, his highest placing yet, and still losing out to long-time rival Steve Jobs, a poll topper for the first time. (Previous years winners include Rupert Murdoch (2002), Steve Case (2001) and Chris Gent (2000).)
• The rise of two groups - those focused on service delivery (including the heads of IBM (at 7), Capita (26), the NHS' Richard Granger (14), OGC's Peter Gershon (9) and Indian PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee (8)) and those we've called 'free spirits' - not only Linus Torvalds (5) but people such as the mayor of Munich (20), Chinese premier Hu Jintao (4), uber-developer Erich Gamma (31) and human genome pioneer John Sulston (39).
• The presence of UK players - not for parochial reasons but because people such as the NHS' Granger (14), BT's Ben Verwaayen (25), Stephen Carter at Ofcom (18), Spamhaus' Steve Linford (19) and Betfair's Stephen Hill (41) are being watched and potentially copied by others around the world.

We also have the strong showing from the leaders of China and India, the former for use of open source and controlling potentially the largest consumer market, the latter for offshoring and other IT services initiatives.

Obvious politicos, the likes of Blair, Bush and Greenspan - all past Agenda Setters - don't get a look in, while this year's Eliot Spitzer (correctly called 18 months ago ahead of that man's purge of Wall Street) might be Roger Cole (6), chair of the Risk Management Group of the Basel II Committee on Banking Supervision. You heard it here first.

But more than anything is the churn. The 2003 snapshot takes place, for the first time, 18 months after the last one, and we have 31 new entries. Past agenda setters such as Steve Case, Jean-Marie Messier, Thomas Middelhoff, Michel Bon and Chris Gent are no longer just not on the list, they're gone from the positions that put them in the position to shape the broad industry.

Not so other figures - most notably Cisco's John Chambers, Nokia's Jorma Ollila, Sony's Nobuyuki Idei, eBay's Meg Whitman, Intel's Craig Barrett and Autonomy's Mike Lynch - who are still in general in favour at their companies but just not deemed influential enough by our experts this year.

There are only three women out of the 50 (up from two last year but down on an all-time high of five back in the dot-com boom days of 2000) and as for nationalities - well, let's just say there are plenty in there and in today's complex world isn't that all rather irrelevant anyway?

If anything, this year's list shows us that while there will always be the billionaire influencers and company CEOs, the entrepreneurs and media barons, a new breed of Agenda Setters has risen, arguably not so concerned with technology or money. They are those for whom service delivery is key or open source is a guiding principle.

We have our esteemed panel of IT chief, politician, lawyer, broadcaster, academic, author, networker and consultants to thank for this mix. (Vendors were turned away at the door.) So check out the full 50, read the analysis and let us know what you think by emailing editorial@silicon.com. It's a good game.