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.'"

Comments

Re:Jobs is going to be pissed.

[baryon351]

Someone is using Steve Jobs RDF and he is going to be pissed!

He probably would be, if mossberg wasn't on the pro apple side from time to time. I haven't read enough of his stuff to know if he's really solidly apple, but there are often links from Apple's hot news site to articles about how walt has enjoyed iPods and iMacs.

Two RDFs... it could split the planet in two... wahey hey.

Power is a wonderful thing to waste

[scaltagi_the_pirate]

"I don't give a fuck about your stock price!" Finally, a man with a vision. I mean, great, he might be right sometimes, but how many good technologies might this man stop with a simple off-the-cuff remark in an article? A little too much power I think.

Mossberg

[mfh]

Mossberg might be powerful in terms of the flow of money (ie: entropy), but the collective minds of Slashdot readers will always be more powerful in terms of long-term product/service viability because it's communities like Slashdot that truly direct the whole world-influence; if we see shit, we call it shit, and if we see gold we call it gold. Sites like Slashdot influence informed technology purchases, I would think, much more than someone like Mossberg could.

Mossberg is overrated

[Ars-Fartsica]

In general his columns are nontechnical and harmless almost to the point of being fluffy. Walt has good intentions but I can't put his commentary above the other hundreds of gadget dudes providing pedestrian reviews of consumer electronics.

let's see if Google listens to him

[JoeBuck]

In today's column, he urged Google to provide an alternative version of Gmail (possibly with a charge) that would have better privacy features, and no scanning messages to insert ads. If Google listens, then maybe he has power.

Re:let's see if Google listens to him

[dewdrops]

..or they just decided to do it on their own. It's not like that's a new idea; tons of free sites allow one to buy a subscription which allows one to skips the ads.

That's the problem I have with most of the things Wired attributes to Mossberg's doing; they're obvious suggestions that the companies probably would've done anyway.

List of influential people?

[j.leidner]

I wonder who else you believe might be as influential as him.
The first person that comes to my mind is Tim O'Reilly, albeit Tim's orientation is more directly towards the engineer audience.

Re:It's not just what he says, but where he says i

[Rodrin]

How about he convinces Real to make a player that doesn't suck, doesn't intrude on your system and not be a general overall pain in the ass. Hmm? $0.02

Re:It's not just what he says, but where he says i

[inphinity]

Mossberg actually did blast Real on several occasions for both their inability to provide a clear link to free Realplayer, as well as their big-brothered approach to "free" software.

Although I'm not sure if he had a direct impact on their decision, soon after his columns ran, Real revamped their site to make it "easier" to download the free player...

Go figure...

Re:Thoughts on Mossberg from a long-time WSJ reade

[xmas2003]

Dever,

I don't disagree with you - yep, the Slashdot crowd has very little affect on those types of decisions, but ideally, someone at those companies SHOULD have been thinking about some of these bad decisions - so yes, it's good that Mossberg "stopped 'em", but I think the market would have eventually self-corrected 'em ... but darn shame Microsoft and Intuit couldn't figure the DUHHHH out for themselves.

I still think an "Average Joe" with half a brain (who happens to be the WSJ technology editor) could have done the same thing - by point is Mossberg is not some amazing reviewer/sage/writer, but more that he has a nice perch to write from and it IS good that he looks out for the average consumer.

Shows who really rules everything: capitalists

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

I have nothing against the journalist so don't take my comment in that manner... This just goes to show how much power the capitalists have over everything. I can guarantee you that he has the impact that he does simply because WSJ is read by investors and executives.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Yeah right..

[Pranjal]

Like when slashdot collectively said that the I-Pod mini is crap and it turned out to be a hit?

You are speaking about that right?