I hate to be a hater, but I was never too impressed with Mossberg's reporting. My opinion is that his platform was stronger than his content. I suppose my claim is Mossberg was the New York Times Best Seller List of tech writing.
- Energy Use/Efficiency of tech (not just laptops I'm talking datacenters, etc.)
- Governance of the Internet
- Privacy (until recently - sort of [and it still gets buried])
- Software copyright issues
- Market/monetary prospects for new tech
(I think the article sort of talks about the fear of
"crushing innovation")
- Energy tech itself (new forms of power generation, batteries)
- Tech in our lives (and I'm not talking about the fear card)
- autonomous vehicles, medical devices, etc.
And Mossberg was and is part of the problem. It's pageantry for the common man rather than serious journalism.
Things have improved slightly since I wrote that 3 or 4 years ago but there is still waaaaaaay too much noise about Apple's latest widgets. Instead we should be hearing much more about the socioeconomic, political, and societal impacts that technology has and the fact that Apple's entire business model is centered around filling our landfills with their devices that become unusable with their latest version of iOS.
How can you Square writing that statement with the fact that Samsung (as just the foremost Android vendor) sells more phones than Apple, provides software updates for them for a fraction as long, has significantly shorter average device working lifetimes and doesn't come close to Apple's record on recycling? Yet you're picking on Apple. Name one device vendor that is doing more to address these issues? How can you be interested in this issue and not be perfectly aware of all of this?
I don't think it's about intelligence. I really don't see how the poster can possibly not know all of this. So if that's true, why post a comment like that? I don't think it's anything to do with a lack of smarts, in fact quite the opposite. People who post stuff like that know very well what they are doing.
I didn't downvote him - as far as I know you can't downvote replies to your own comments.
P.S. The other smart phone manufacturers are just as guilty, but Apple makes the most profit from externalizing their costs. The other phone manufacturers basically lose money on the operation AFAIK.
Mossberg wasn't a "techie" in the sense of delighting in technology for the sake of itself, and so he wasn't that attractive to those of us that are. Rather he was a writer who appealed to people skeptical of technology and who wanted to know if a particular device would really be useful to somebody without a technical background for actual uses.
I have to say I agree. I'm only familiar with his recent writings but they didn't strike me as very original or standout reporting, so I don't get the adoration. I also found some of his on-stage tech interviews rather lacking in depth and personality.
I'm probably wrong though, and I get the impression I would have had to follow his contributions from his early career through to his later work to truly appreciate his influence on the tech industry.
On-stage he was IMO ok, but the ATD interviews were lowered very much in quality by his co-host Kara Swisher. Why was she in that position again and again? Why two hosts for an interview at all?
Jean-Louis Gassée (author of this piece on Mossberg) is one of my favorite commentators. He's just enough of an insider and yet also an oddball, which means he keeps it pretty real in an area that tends to be an echo chamber of fawning cultists.
Dan Gillmor did a lot of very astute writing (not necessarily just reporting, but also commentary) about many aspects of the scene in SV when he wrote for the San Jose Mercury-News. He didn't seem to care much for gossip or writing purely about personalities, and was more interested in cultural and legal effects of new technologies. I believe he's now occasionally writing for the Guardian, as well as teaching journalism at the university level.
