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Mossberg Final Column: The Disappearing Computer
- vowelless 9y agoGreat column. And end of an era. Good luck to him.
- Animats 9y agoAnother one gone. John Markoff retired this year, too.
- chmaynard 9y agoJust to clarify, John Markoff was a distinguished New York Times correspondent, based in San Francisco, who covered the Bay Area tech industry.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoThis 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 9y agoI teared up in the end. Completely unexpected
- davidiach 9y ago"Mossberg out" got to me too.
- phil9987 9y agoCarefully 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 9y agoExcept 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
- shriphani 9y agoGreat column. What a body of work! I wish I have something that touched so many lives when I finally hang up my gloves.
- ianai 9y agoI 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 9y agoThat's more or less how Tor works.
- ianai 9y agoI see that, but I was hoping for lower level.
- chmaynard 9y agoMossberg 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 9y agoThere 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.
- liotier 9y ago"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.
- ptero 9y agoIt is a common theme -- the first time big ideas are tried they often fizzle. The second time, usually after 10+ years, is when the kinks get worked out, underlying technology needs are better understood and the tech can expand (or explode) in the consumer markets. AI, video calls (AT&T -> skype), GUIs, digital cameras, etc. I hope recent bio boom will return in 10-15 years with real breakthroughs (as is, visible and useful to an average person).
- rootbear 9y agoBefore 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.
- hugs 9y agoFrom 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.)
- nerdponx 9y agoAnd robotics in industrial manufacturing are a REALLY BIG thing. Seems silly to discount that, unless by "robotics" he means "robotics+AI"
- snerbles 9y agoIndustrial automation isn't particularly visible to the average consumer on a day-to-day basis.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoAverage consumers have no clue about the incredibly complex industrial infrastructure that keeps food on the table, the lights on, and transport, communications, and logistics running. I think this stuff should be taught in schools. From Mossberg's POV industrial computing and industrial robotics are already ambient and invisible. Not everyone needs a professional understanding of how they work, but some basic clue wouldn't be bad.
- djrogers 9y agoGiven his focus on consumer electronics, it seems probable that he's referring to consumer robots. In that space we have roombas, pool cleaners, and a handful of selfie-taking quadcopters. Definitely niche.
- martincmartin 9y ago"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." -- Roy Amara disclaimer: I have a Ph.D. in Robotics from CMU. AI is similar: in the 1960s, it seemed machine translation was "just around the corner," but it turned out to not be practical for a long time. Until it was, in the 2000s or so.
- ebbv 9y agoGood 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.
- ThomPete 9y agoMost people doesn't have your or my kind of work. And even those that do will be able to use their phone on any screen at some point. So I think it's fair to say that the smartphone was a continuation of the laptop not the feature phone.
- ebbv 9y agoMy wife is an assistant. She does a lot of her work on email. But not all of it. She can't do her job on her smartphone. Almost nobody can do their entire job through their smartphone, and that's not going to change. They are not replacing the personal computer, they're just an additional device that has a different role.
- ThomPete 9y agoSorry but you are simply wrong. You keep using people who use personal computers as their work tool. But thats missing the point. We are not talking about engineers, designers and people who need to work in excel all day but they are still a minority compared to those who own a smartphone. The point is that many people don't own a computer but use their smartphone to do everything with. You see that once you have to build solutions for the masses.
- ebbv 9y ago
- ThomPete 9y agoThere 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.
- jonstokes 9y agoMossberg 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 9y agoI 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 9y agoI 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.