The Most Powerful Man in Technology Journalism 205
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.'"
Re:Jobs is going to be pissed. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [apple.com] 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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Mossberg (Score:5, Interesting)
Mossberg is overrated (Score:5, Interesting)
let's see if Google listens to him (Score:4, Interesting)
List of influential people? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not just what he says, but where he says i (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:let's see if Google listens to him (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Shows who really rules everything: capitalists (Score:5, Interesting)
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Yeah right.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?