PlexNex

Bellwether Tech Journalist Demonstrates He's a Putz

Tech punditry & online "journalism" both take a hit when John C. Dvorak is shown on this Google Video (ostensibly with Dave Winer behind the camera) admitting to deliberately taking incendiary positions to inflame Mac users with the intention of pumping up his hit stats.

You can't get more smug than JCD in what he will have assumed was a private moment drifting down memory lane with a geek friend in the fabulous Apple store.

Nevertheless, his recent outing of the idiotic & self-defeating Microsoft Zune Reviewers Kit is great stuff.

My message: dissing Microsoft and dissing the Mac are two very different things.

Educating Coursey

Groklaw calmly takes on David Coursey's last fatuous opinion piece with points from the Massachusetts ETRM 3.5 policy FAQ. Leaving no intentional error unaddressed, Groklaw highlights the most telling evidence that David Coursey is being compensated under the table by Microsoft:

Finally, Coursey states something rather odd, and it's precisely here that Microsoft's  train runs off the rails:

[Coursey:] Microsoft is here, and as the overwhelming choice of customers, it gets to make certain decisions, file formats being one of them

First, the thing about being a monopoly is that people lack a choice, so it's a stretch to say people have chosen it. Try to buy a computer without Microsoft's operating system. Second, Microsoft doesn't get to tell governments what file formats to use. Coursey asks on what authority Quinn chose a file format for government use in executive agencies. There is statutory authority for that, actually, as the FAQ showed. But Microsoft has no such authority, and it's extraordinary that anyone would suggest that one of the perks of being a monopolist is that you get to tell governments what to do and what file formats to use. Has Microsoft forgotten who works for whom?

I want to affirm that such an opinion expressed by David Coursey here is impossible -- either to hold or to advance -- because it is too flagrantly stupid & self-contradictory. It cannot be possible for an individual -- particularly a tech journalist who reads the news day to day, who was ostensibly educated in the United States -- to believe that a company gets to decide something as fundamental as the file format for a government. Or that dominance comes first and proprietary file formats second.

To pretend to believe this is the height of corruption, and I would not pretend to slander David Coursey without good evidence that he is corrupt. It is one thing to be paid for opinions: there are whole industries for that -- of which mine (Advisory) is a part. It is another to be paid for opinions that couldn't possibly be true, that the opinion-sayer does not himself believe, and which do real harm to the ecomomy and to individuals the world over. (This I declare the very week that Bill & Melinda Gates are featured on the cover of Time Magazine, which is the most interesting contrast I have honestly seen in recent days or ranking with the best ever in my lifetime. Not unlike the photograph of the "Whites Only" sign over the WC at a Ku Klux Klan meeting hall.)

David Coursey is a garden-variety Microsoft Astroturfer, aspiring but inadequate to the mold of Jack Abramoff. Coursey is the lowest life-form in Microsoft's custom-built, made-to-order disinformation food chain. 

See my comment on more funded opinions from the Smug Pundit.

Mossberg: Forked Tongue in Aspic

Dear Walter,

You're wrong again. Mercy, when will you ever get a clue?

This piece you wrote on hardware companies rescuing the under-served segments of the desktop market: where ever did you get that bright idea? Exploring such a dud theme betrays your ignorance of the fundamentals of your beat.

The problem of course is Windows, Microsoft, their narcisistic weltanschauung, their combative proprietary view of business and customers of all kinds (who don't know better) and this network effect we are working to unwind.

You say,

"In my view, the world would be better off if the biggest computer companies started catering more to the non-IT part of the market, where most computers live."

Sit back and let companies do this for us, you say. Relax and let the elegant, unfettered forces of capitalism -- the Invisible Hand -- guide us to Utopia, you say.  Well, as Tony Montana said, "Look at you now..."

You can't be that stupid. Do you even have a PC? I know those IBM Selectrics are nice but, geeze...it's two thousand & five...sorry, two thousand and SIX!

If you're talking about hp, Dell and even the parts of IBM which are dependent upon Microsoft -- they're just dumb extensions of Microsoft. They couldn't possibly attempt to exert an influence on PC customers; Microsoft merely slaps them down -- contractually. Hardware is irrelevant to what you think you're talking about.

This is what Linux does so effectively: cater to different segments of the population. For evidence I only need to reference the Little Green Laptop story out of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte's baby will not be running Windows, FYI. Have you paused lately to consider why this device does not use Windows?

I would add, regarding your traditional uncharitable views toward open source and open standard software, that disruptive innovations are not created in a day. It appears your imagination is too dull to accommodate the remotest possibility. Like so many others long in the tooth, you appear to be fearful of the threat Open Source & Free Software and open standards represent to your career base, rooted in an obsolete world. So many of your readers are retired and have no way to confirm your tired and dusty themes until their 401K Plans start to erode. If you are afraid of open standards (like OpenDocument, for example), then you are afraid of the Internet itself.

Walt. I hung up reading The Wallstreet Journal because of Capitalist Tools like yourself. It's a junk paper -- like Fox or CNN, it is pablum for the infirm. Yourself? Smug as David Coursey. Open your mind or retire. Either way, it won't be too soon.

Sam Hiser
New York, New York

David Coursey's Smug Punditry

Coursey is eWeek's smug tech pundit who trades on being difficult to please. He'd do well to trade on discernment and common sense.

In a pre-Christmas piece, he pretty much gives Vista beta the snore. But, there, he says something so lacking in business sense that it compels one to reevaluate his entire ouvre of snotty, cantankerous tech-advisory.

Giving away complete malware protection is the right thing for Microsoft to do for all its operating systems, not just Vista.

Now, if Microsoft gave away anti-virus software for free, that would kill McAfee and Symantec, the last remaining friends Microsoft has got. Moreover, there is very little sense in Microsoft being in the anti-virus business since it represents a conflict of interest plus they could put the same energy into the basic code and achieve far more security, enough perhaps to lower the importance of anti-virus software for their users.

The statement is off-the-cuff, speculative and uninformed. No, actually it's an old CIA disinformation technique: feigned objectivity, pretending to be damanding of both sides, pretending to be hard on his client (Microsoft) too. The agent must be smart, be correct, to pull this trick off.

So, it should give readers of eWeek pause before they take anything David Coursey has to say at face value. He not even a very good lier. Doesn't even have that going for him.