
Mossberg Final Column: The Disappearing Computer - andrewl
https://www.recode.net/2017/5/25/15689094/mossberg-final-column
======
jonstokes
Mossberg did a lot of good work, but so did a lot of other columnists who
didn't attain nearly the status he did.

Mossberg mostly has one guy to thank for the unique place he occupied in the
tech media scene: Steve Jobs. For whatever reason, Jobs decided that
Mossberg's take on Apple products really mattered, a lot. Mossberg was Jobs's
stand-in for Mr. Everyman, and Jobs seemed to believe that if Mossberg
couldn't connect with a product, then it needed to be re-thought.

His status as anointed deliverer of the final verdict on Apple's product line
gave Mossberg a massive amount of influence in the tech world all by itself,
but added to this was the fact that, as with so many other things, the rest of
the tech industry slavishly followed Apple's lead -- at least, the rest of the
tech industry's PR departments followed it. For a corporate PR flack, having
Jobs's own personal oracle say nice things about your product was the ultimate
win. It was the fat Harvard admissions envelope, by which I mean something
like, "this achievement, while important, has a way outsized significance to a
certain segment of the population who compete for it because they've all
decided that getting this particular thing means You Won and have a higher
status than all of your peers who haven't gotten it."

Interestingly enough, the passing of Jobs was followed by the passing of the
positive Mossberg review as the ultimate prize in the PR world, and Mossberg's
departure from the WSJ didn't help.

Am I ripping on Mossberg? Not really, more like I'm ripping corporate PR, but
Mossberg certainly cultivated this situation (who wouldn't, though). I will
say that it was a source of eternal frustration (and envy) among the rest of
the tech punditry that Mossberg's reviews had this bizarre status with the PR
departments of the companies we covered, sort of like "Harvard as the agreed
upon brass ring that all yuppie parents have decided to compete for" no doubt
occasions much eye-rolling at Stanford, Brown, Yale, and everywhere else.
Nobody is sad to see that era pass.

As for Mossberg himself, Godspeed, dude. May your amulet never tickle.

~~~
djrogers
I think you may have cause and effect flip-flopped here - Mossberg was the
everyman's tech columnist long before Apple became the hot thing to cover.

~~~
lod723
I think he got it right. Mossberg was one amongst a number of everyman tech
columnists for a while, but Jobs really elevated him once Apple got popular.

~~~
jonstokes
This is exactly right. Most major (and many regional and local) newspapers had
an Everyman tech columnist. Mossberg just happened to be that guy for the WSJ.

The other thing I maybe should've mentioned, though, was that Mossberg was a
very early and emphatic booster of the Jobs 2.0-era Apple products. Back when
Jobs had just returned after the Next acquisition, Mossberg got on that
bandwagon immediately and began talking up their products.

So in its initial stages, the Jobs/Mossberg love-fest was a bit of a
symbiosis. Recall that this was in a bygone era when the powerhouse WSJ at
least as big of a deal as the struggling Apple Computer company. In later
years, when Apple was the giant we now know and Jobs had ascended to the
pantheon of industrial greats, the relationship probably did a lot more for
Mossberg than it did for Jobs.

(It's hard to recall, but there was once a time when Apple was a niche,
struggling little tech company with a minuscule market share, and big
newspapers were still a Big Deal. The Jobs/Mossberg relationship had its roots
in that era.)

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ComputerGuru
This made me inexplicably sad. I wasn't a huge Mossberg fan or anything and
haven't read more than a handful of his articles (nothing against the man, of
course). But I think it's hard to hear about this and not be affected, even if
only a tiny bit. We're some 35 or so years into the era of the personal
computer and it's basically at that point where an entire generation of great
names in the industry have spent a full and productive career in the service
of technology and are now stepping down... and in some ways, the industry
itself is retiring (as he mentions). Times are a-changing and we must change
with them, adapt or die.

So long, Walt.

~~~
camillomiller
I teared up in the end. Completely unexpected

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liotier
_" Ubiquitous computing (or 'ubicomp') is a concept in software engineering
and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere.
In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any
device, in any location, and in any format. [..] This paradigm is also
described as pervasive computing. [..] Mark Weiser coined the phrase
"ubiquitous computing" around 1988, during his tenure as Chief Technologist of
the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)"_
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing)

I find interesting that the concepts dreamt in the 80's are becoming common,
now that technology has caught up.

~~~
rootbear
Before he was at PARC, Mark Weiser was a professor at the University of
Maryland. I took one of his classes and I always found him brilliant. I'm very
sad that he did not live to see the arrival of the Internet of Things and the
Maker movement and super-cheap computing, all of which touch on his ideas of
Ubiquitous Computing. He'd have loved it.

------
ianai
I think privacy concerns could seriously diminish or alter the AI
developments. I sometimes wonder if the internet doesn't need a new
abstraction. i.e. The academic underpinnings of network protocols are allowing
governments and corporations to overstep. Maybe in the future having an ISP
provider without a 'privacy provider' will be like having a car without
insurance?

Technically, I'm thinking of something like thousands of VPN connections
distributing packets across randomly chosen data paths. Some trade off of
bandwidth for abstracting away "which IP is doing what". (bleary-eyed thought:
some sort of probability field applied to TCP/IP)

~~~
princekolt
That's more or less how Tor works.

~~~
ianai
I see that, but I was hoping for lower level.

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hugs
From the article: "and robotics are in their infancy, a niche, with too few
practical uses as yet."

Why does it seem like robotics is always niche and not practical yet? It seems
like robotics is perennially on the cusp of being the next big thing, but
never really is.

(I'd qualify that robotics are the old big thing in industrial manufacturing,
though.)

~~~
bluGill
Is my dishwasher in the kitchen a robot? Justify your answer (either is
acceptable, I'm looking for your reasoning).

~~~
wvenable
I think a robot has to have an arm. If it doesn't have an arm, it's not a
robot -- it's just a machine. The whole robot could just be a single arm or
the arm can just be one part. But it has to have an arm.

~~~
JauntTrooper
Haha. There is an anthropomorphic element to it.

When most people think 'robot', they think of something with human or animal-
like elements. So for example a rolling delivery or security drone would be a
robot, but an automated car would not.

~~~
wvenable
Too human-like and it's an Android. Not creature-like enough and it's just a
machine.

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chmaynard
Mossberg was a professional technology critic and pundit, one of the first of
his kind. He paved the way for many others who followed his lead, and he
certainly deserves credit for his pioneering efforts. I enjoy reading critical
reviews of new products and software, but I'm generally not a fan of tech
punditry. I believe that we need fewer pundits and prognosticators, and more
hard-hitting investigative reporters along the lines of John Carreyrou.

~~~
joezydeco
There were others before Mossberg, and IMO they did a better job. _Infoworld_
used to be a weekly read for a lot of us in the tech community, and they had a
number of experienced columnists (e.g. Dvorak, Cringely) that could have
easily slid into the job that Mossberg was handed at the WSJ in the late 1980s
(after nearly two decades of non-tech related coverage for the newspaper).

If you read his earliest work, you get the feeling that he sometimes had no
idea what he was talking about. But he kissed up to the CEOs of the major
companies, which dovetailed nicely with the editorial stance of the WSJ and
the P/R needs of respective companies.

~~~
jacquesm
Don't forget Jerry Pournelle, if anybody holds that title it should be him.

~~~
joezydeco
Absolutely. Sorry I missed that name.

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phil9987
Carefully chosen words and full of future visions. Thank you. We will see if
this will indeed go in the direction he suggests - as usually one cannot
foresee what will disrupt the world next. It can be something completely new
which has nothing to do with computers.

~~~
joezydeco
Except most of these profound visions from Mossberg are things that have been
discussed in the tech community for decades.

Don Norman wrote _The Invisible Computer_ 19 years ago.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/invisible-
computer](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/invisible-computer)

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ebbv
Good column but this ongoing idea that the smartphone is the new personal
computer is wrong. It's a different type of device. Smartphones are not
replacing computers in terms of a device to get work done, other than email
and phone calls. Doing real work for just about any job on a smartphone, even
a big one like my iPhone 7 Plus, is not really viable. You still need a laptop
or desktop to work in a spreadsheet, design a full page ad layout or do
serious programming.

We need to let go of this idea that new technology is always a version of some
other one, or replacing some other one. That's actually rare. Most of the time
new inventions are just that; new.

~~~
topranks
It is the interface (small, touchscreen) that is new, along with the wireless
network connectivity.

Other than that a smartphone is most definitely a personal computer though.
There are many, less keyboard/mouse bound tasks that people regularly did on
desktop PCs 10-15 years ago that we now do on our phones.

~~~
ebbv
Is an ATM a personal computer? Is a laser printer a personal computer? Is a
flight control system a personal computer?

Not every device that is made out of a computer is a personal computer. In
fact, most are not.

~~~
liotier
The mobile tablet is not just a personal computer but a downright intimate
one.

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ThomPete
There are two ways to look at this.

1) It's really sad that we aren't able to get better progress than we have

2) It's great that we are still far from robots taking over as that leaves a
huge option space for startups.

Personally I think many things literally are around the corner and that the
corner is getting closer, faster and faster.

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Animats
Another one gone. John Markoff retired this year, too.

~~~
chmaynard
Just to clarify, John Markoff was a distinguished New York Times
correspondent, based in San Francisco, who covered the Bay Area tech industry.

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vowelless
Great column. And end of an era. Good luck to him.

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shriphani
Great column. What a body of work! I wish I have something that touched so
many lives when I finally hang up my gloves.

