We lost one of the great writers and thinkers of our time this week, John C. Dvorak. Okay, he wasn’t a novelist, screenwriter, philosopher, or anything. He was a tech journalist. Well, more than that, he was sort of a force — usually thought-provoking, often fight-provoking, and even when he was wrong, he got you thinking, because he at least asked the right question. So, while most tech sites are going to be giving you tributes about his many accomplishments, accolades, and witty one-liners over the years, I just wanted to throw a few words about what he meant to me, personally, out into the void.
So, yeah, like most young nerds of my generation, back in the 90s I spent a lot of time watching the fledgling tech cable networks like CNET, ZDTV, TechTV, and shows like TWiT, Silicon Spin, and later, Cranky Geeks. Some people watched sports. I watched people argue about chipsets, operating systems, and cultural issues near and dear to my heart like DMCA, The Communications Decency Act, net neutrality, etc.
My wife at the time tolerated this far better than she should have. She was an old-school librarian with almost no interest in anything digital. Most of the time she’d simply roll her eyes and go back to her book or something while I took it all in like any normal 20-something suburbanite watching SportsCenter.
On the other hand, if John C. Dvorak came on the screen, she’d often stop. “Oh, wait. That guy? I like him. He makes sense. He speaks English.” This is probably as good a compliment as you’re going to get as a tech journo. Well, that, and the fact that at least once a week, we would skip David Letterman on the big TV, and fall asleep watching Cranky Geeks on a CRT in the corner of the bedroom instead.
While he had many quips and one-liners worth framing and putting on any geek’s wall, there were a few pearls of serious wisdom I took to heart. A few years later, when my partner and I started a software company, I stole the unofficial operating mode from a Dvorak rant. He said (paraphrasing, obviously), suppose you have two products. Product A is a mess written in spaghetti code, with half-finished features, bugs everywhere, and a user interface that may as well be a map to the Ark of the Covenant because nobody can follow it. Product B is immaculate, architected, and elegant, with code that is commented, documented, stable, and reliable. Which one will become the industry standard? The first one that gets to market … unless the second one is cheaper.
It was funny because it was painfully true. Engineering excellence and marketplace success are related, but they are not the same thing. I not only learned it the hard way, but I’ve seen it repeated at multiple companies since then.
On the emergence of cloud computing, he was initially notoriously skeptical. Microsoft is putting it all out there for you to see. First of all, Azure is a shade of blue. In this case, the color of a blue sky. You know, a sky without clouds. For that matter, a cloud is really just a shapeless, intangible mass of vapor … as in vaporware. Okay, he was wrong, and cloud computing did in fact become the de facto standard a decade later, but he did nail their awful marketing strategy out of the gate.
Finally, there were notoriously hostile interactions with the iPhone, the iPad, and tablet computing in general, tablets being just giant iPhones without the phone. Of course, being a proper gadget geek, I didn’t care. I had to have one. Frankly, after I got my first one, I remember being less than enthused and rarely using it. I never put my finger on why until an episode of Cranky Geeks when Dvorak pointed out, “No geek is going to like these things. They’re content consumption devices. You can’t make anything with them, at least not more easily than you can with a laptop with a real keyboard and mouse.
Suddenly, self-realization kicks in. I never thought to look at technology that way: Some people primarily consume technology; others primarily create with technology. I looked around my office. There were a couple of books, a TV I rarely watched, and a modest video library I also never watched. I spent most of my time programming, writing novels, making websites, recording podcasts, and editing videos of bands playing. I spend about 80% of my time creating and 20% consuming. I was never a big video gamer or a big fan of TV, and I go to maybe two movies a year. Sure, music or a baseball game was always playing, but those are passive background things. So, I’m a “content creator.” I have a tribe! Thanks, Dvorak!
So, looking back on John C. Dvorak, that’s what he gave me more than any piece of technical advice or market insight. He taught me a way of thinking about technology, the way it’s marketed, the way it becomes a zeitgeist despite inferior engineering, but most importantly, that it’s about the people who use the tech more than it is about what goes into the tech. Or, as my wife figured out long before I did. “He makes sense. He speaks English.”
