Slashdot Mirror
The Most Powerful Man in Technology Journalism
prostoalex writes "The Wired magazine takes a look at Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for Wall Street Journal Personal Technology section. The magazine quotes some of the technology advances and fixes, for which we should be thankful to Walt Mossberg: 'RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers' sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures.'"
Mossberg also has one of the most powerful positions in all of tech journalism... The Wall Street Journal is read by an audience of stock investors.
In short, if you're a tech company and you don't do what he says, Wall Street's going to notice what he called you out over. That'd be harmful to your stock price...
...what this really tells me is that anyone who is fortunate to write for the WSJ wields a stupdi amount of power over a lot of folks with stock portfolios, who in turn knee-jerk their way to whatever thing they read next in the investment bible of choice. Mossberg is not evil, stupdi, or a hack, but he isn't writing gospel (even if some folks seem to think he is).
Call me when he's managed to get the RIAA to stop being jerks... then I'll be impressed.
And although he doesn't often put in a good word for Linus and the gang, he does frequently preach the virtues of 'alternative software', and isn't afraid to take on issues like ridiculous DRM .
So, in a nutshell, that is what makes him a good reporter!
Yeah, we all know well Slashdot can predict technology. iPod anyone?
And for that reason, he likely won't say ever say that "Linux" is ready for the desktop... he's waiting for a major distribution to truely have a product that's ready for businesses to use. When that happens, he'll endorce that one.
I think he's on record as saying Lindows, er, Linspire isn't that one.
We should be thankful that at least he understands what he's writing about event from user rather than geek level. There are a lot of people out there who write reviews/opinions without the full facts etc...
Better still: a slobbery article in Wired vastly overstating the importance of tech journalists. Journalism is mostly logrolling, but this sort of thing is right at the top of the incest dogpile (hmm, if it's phrased that way maybe John Ashcroft will decide he has to do something about it).
That said, being obvious, mundane and not terribly insightful is kind of the point of a column like Mossberg's. He's simply a clearing house for new crap - the person you send it to with an outlook pretty much equivalent to his readers'. They can't try out all the new kit individually, so someone was elected as guinea pig. And from that perspective he really doesn't have much "power" at all, because he has to write pretty much what his audience would have written, or they won't read him. Nothing limits the scope of what one can say like popularity.
Having a great amount of power is like having a monopoly, it's usually only bad when you start being an asshole about it.
ps. do you worry about GNU/Linus shutting down what could be some earth shatteringly wonderful project with some unthought off-the-cuff remark?
- I'd prefer not to.
However, in order for Slashdot to have an opinion on a product, it first has to be made... Mossberg's early reviews can end up killing a company so that its later products never come out. He can reject things in the theory stages that way.
The problem with a monopoly isnt that its only bad when you start being an asshole about it, its that just the existance of a monopoly places unfair stress on a market thereby denying opportunities to other technologies (or what have you). This can occur without you even knowing about it - I can drive the price of something down and push a potential competitor out without even knowing about them - and I would be practicing good business, and I might even do it for good (non-asshole) reasons!
And everybody should worry about influential peoples' opinions - yes, even Linus. They may be knowledgeable, but cannot be correct all the time. Its important to be questioning of such influence.
Enderle is the one who called Linux users "terrorists" and who thinks that SCO should win its case...
So, ummm, why would anyone listen to that guy, again? I mean, he decides to fling allegations of "terrorism" when he gets hatemail for being an idiot online, and (worse!) tend to discredit or disbelieve his oh-so-insightful analysis.
The man may be oft-quoted, but he's not exactly the brightest I've ever met... Seems to be one of the "contrarian" archetypes--that is, those who think that anything widely believed must be wrong. That includes, of course, both popular misconceptions and utter nonsense...
My point is that he is not writing to tell you and me what is up. He is 57 years old and he is writing to tell my partents what is up. And frankly, I think he does a good service. My folks are clueless when it comes to using their Tivo and iMac and miniDV camera. The fact that Wall Street gives him so much credit makes sense, old people have more money.
If you are starting a company that needs Wall Street support, or needs old people's money, by all means, appeal to this man. If you are like me and don't give a darn whether or not you are one of 100 or one of 1 million people using the BEST of what is around, you can feel free to ignore everything this guy says.
I have had a very fullfilling time finding my own favorite tech gadets and software, I don't need this guy to tell me anything. I will point out his column to my Dad though.
The Slashdot article you refer to is very interesting. CmdrTaco made a comment on the submission ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."), a mistake which no respectable journalist would make (let the fact speak for themselves).
However the bulk of the article comments, the real mind of Slashdot, most of the +5 insightful comments were saying: "wait a minute, this is *not* lame: firewire, small form factor, cool software, 5GB is plenty, this is gonna fly", which it did.
Don't confuse one editor with the Slashdot collective. I'm always interested by the mixture of inane and extremely insightful comments that Slashdot generates.
because all the PHBs are folks that don't know what their product actually _is_ or how _real_ people
/. article) as we
would use it and they need someone to slap them a bit so they can see the problems. If a lot of tech
companies actually spent any time _using_, testing, and refining a product before releasing it, things
could be a lot better. The bottom line is that many technology products need to be like the proverbial
toaster/phone; it does exactly what you think it should do and you don't necessarily need a manual to operate it.
At any rate, I agree with his philosophy, i.e. that much of technology products today are too hard to
use when they don't have to be. Part of the problem is really analysing what the function
purpose/workflow is; If you don't actually _use_ a product you designed or test it on someone not
familiar with its purpose, you might not see all those places that break your train of thought or the flow.
When I went to college(1979), a CS degree was more programmer/analyst and less code
monkey/god. As a result, while I'm not the greatest programmer, I write easy-to-use, reliable,
maintainable, functional programs that do what they're supposed to, the way the operator
wants them to work. I spend a lot of time _in_ the process so I can feel the way the workflow is going.
In a production environment, things that break the flow or require you to go someplace else to get
required information encourage operator error. It's also less efficient.
We shouldn't worry so much about how optimised the code is(see
should be worrying about whether people will continue to use a product again and again(and recommend
it to others) because it's easy to use and it works as advertised.
Computers are way fast enough as it is for 95% of the work that gets done on them, so spend more time refining!
I don't want to get into a platform flame-fest, so i'll be brief;
I still prefer to use my Mac simply because it's just easier. Dialog boxes, file browsers, etc. that are
too complicated and especially inconsistent like in many "designed for Windows" products
are my pet peeve(this applies to Open Office too.) The order of the file formats in "open" dialog boxes
seem like they're never the same from app to app; "all formats" is sometimes at the top, sometimes at
the bottom. Just pick one way and keep doing it that way!
Here are some of the things I've learned over the years:
For Designers:
- Pretty doesn't necessarily mean useful.
- Consistency, consistency, consistency.
- Can your Mom use it without calling you?
- Simplicity over complexity.
For Programmers:
- Whoever wrote, "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read" should be caned.
Please write good comments and documentation. I've had to ponder over too many
modules with two-letter variable names.
- Assume that You will be supporting the code you just wrote for the next Ten Years off and on.
Will you remember why you wrote that module that way ten years later?
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
Yes, when people do not do what you think they should do, they are obviously stupid.
:-)), but that doesn't mean I don't respect the opinion of my friends who love theirs.
The iPod mini is too small for my personal taste (I'm afraid it'll get lost among my pocket lint
I'm not sure that this is an accurate test of his power. There have been a number of other negative complaints about GMail.
Even if Google changes their tune after this column, this doesn't necessarily mean his article drove them to it. It may just mean that his article was the straw that broke the camel's back.
meh