I never really understood lists. They always seem to exercise a fine blend of biased stereotypes with biased opinions. In my personal opinion, Steve Vai could wipe the floor with Hendrix any day. I'm not ragging on Jimi or what he's done for the world of music. By all means I appreciate his contributions, but music is just forever growing more and more diverse and to continuously hold him as the greatest when song writing and technique has become so advanced and elaborate just seems questionable to me. Let alone the genres that get skipped in the process of narrowing things down. As for influence, I personally think that goes to Les Paul since the business wouldn't even exist without him. As far as my opinion goes we'd need a top 1000 greatest guitarists list to cover all the genres involving guitars in a mildly accurate format and be able to include plenty more guitarists that failed to make the list that have far more right to be there than Tom Morrello. And of course, there's just too much opinion involved for anyone to ever say. That being said, this list is still a hell of a lot better than Rolling Stones'.