In reading your The Year's Top 10 Tech Stories story, I was struck by the sub-head you used for the first entry: Open Source Finally Grows Up. What are you trying to say, really?
I look forward to the day when your publication runs a front page story titled Microsoft Finally Grows Up or maybe Bill Gates Finally Grows Up, with the emphasis squarely on "finally" and "grows up."
I know you're trying to be cute with the headlines you use, but to someone who simply skims the article, you're painting Open Source software with an immature brush stroke and that bothers me. A lot.
Posted by jzawodn at December 30, 2003 01:25 PM
I've never found Ziff Davis to be much more than the National Enquirer of the computer rag industry. It is somewhat of a shame because, and I heard this from a friend of a friend, but some people actually take Ziff Davis magazine articles seriously! There are people in the world who think that John Dvorak is wise!
But seriously, Open Source methodologies and the software resulting from them are where they are today because people who do know what they're talking about have worked on them and used them and written about them and told their friends about them. Open Source is not where it is today because of the sagacity of the Ziff Davis empire.
I noticed the TechTV "Year's biggest Tech flops" article didn't mention the biggest flop of all: TechTV. Ratings are in the toilet, it's up for sale but nobody wants to buy it.
Pat,
JD is like a Fox News commentator. You're going to get outrageous, unsubstantiated claims out of him over and over, and he does this on purpose, because it gets him attention. Rarely is there any substance to anything he's saying. Often he is dead wrong. He never admits it. He often resorts to flame-baiting. When did this become okay for a "journalist" in a national publication? Never. It isn't.
John Dvorak -- or the character he's manifesting for his public articles, at the least -- is like one of those old-school business model fossils who just can't and won't "get it" when it comes to the internet, personal information technology, online media, and the social|political changes that are being catalyzed by the technology and thinking of the day. He's decided that instead of expending (or obtaining, as the case may be) the requisite understanding to grok what is going on in the world around him, that he's going to make a career out of knocking down other people's ideas and accomplishments, to no good end. He's not a critic nor an ombudsman; he's a poseur wearing a thoughtful man's robe, miming a wise man's gestures, while possessing the substance of neither.
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I think there are more annoying journalists than John Dvorak. Didn't he invent that keyboard? :P
