Who is john dvorak

In addition he is a weekly columnist for Dow Jones Marketwatch, Info! A presenter on public radio for eight years, his publication history encompasses more than columns and articles and fourteen books. The American Business Editors Association awarded John their national Gold Award for the best online column of and an unprecedented achievement. In he established his own award system for telecommunications pioneers. John was one of the original members of the advisory board of the Software Entrepreneurs Forum and has been a member of the Software Publishers Association.

Other corporate positions have included Chairman of the Dvorak Development Corporation, board member at Zane Publishing, partner at Discontinuity. He is currently a board member for NTC Corporation, a specialist computer security firm.

These articles are licensed around the world. He is also a weekly columnist for Dow-Jones Marketwatch, Info! He is the former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. He is a contributing editor of PC Magazine , where he has been writing two columns, including the popular "Inside Track," since Dvorak has won eight national awards from the Computer Press Association, including best columnist and best column.

He is also the author of several books on computing including the popular Dvorak's Guide to Telecommunications. His radio show, Real Computing, can be heard on public radio. Dvorak is definitely an industry gadfly, but he's worked at being one. I do it, but what I discovered is that if you have a reputation of just being mean-spirited and negative, which is my reputation, you can actually be mean-spirited and negative with people that you know and kind of get away with it.

I used to be, when I was the editor of InfoWorld, we used to do — This is an example of the way we think about these things —. The problem with this magazine during this era, when it was growing fast was the page count would jump all over the place. InfoWorld came out weekly, which was different than working with other types of publications, especially monthlies, and all of a sudden you had a big hole that you had to fill.

Under my desk, I had started collecting press kits, and press releases and essays written, it would have been like a native ad-type material. They were just in heaven. I wanted the piece to be a clean piece about what I wanted the piece to be about, without a bunch of bull crap from whoever. OK, so the joke, I used to do this. I would occasionally, in my office, I had a closed office, I would bring the staff in to listen to me on a call with one of these people.

I would apologize profusely and ask them for another piece. John Geddes : It may have been native advertising. You were using the source material and taking the sources out. John Dvorak : Taking the advertising out, yeah. I could get three pieces out of almost anybody. John Dvorak : That was it. After that, they figured it out. Butthere was a lot of it, I had a stack this big of these pieces. A lot of them were actually pretty good, a lot of these people were actual writers and with the editing we had, it was dynamite.

PC Magazine, the print publication is gone. One of the editors said which is why I went to new media, I saw it coming, luckily, six or seven years ago. John Geddes : You said six or seven years ago you noticed that. What triggered that? What was your course? What got me to jump into the podcasting? I was seeing other people doing it and they seemed to be doing OK. I think it was either something one of the magazines, maybe it was when PC Magazine dropped its print edition, that could have been it.

John Geddes : You wrote for Forbes for a while in the early part of the decade. John Dvorak : I was brought in for way too much money and too big of an expense account to be kept. I knew that was a problem when I got the job but I was brought in for a purpose. They were going to go public as a separate operation and they never did. So I was out, and I had gone. Then I went over to Larry Kramer, and I asked him for a column, he was looking for a column in MarketWatch, so I worked there for about six years.

Then he left, and my editor left and everybody left and it was taken over by women and I was out. All of these people are successful because all people want are stock tips.

They just want to stare at something and do stock tip after stock tip after stock tip. MarketWatch, when I was ousted, I was also noticing that they were pulling in a bunch of content and this is going on a lot. A lot of outside content going in, this is free material.

This is like me with Info World. John Dvorak : Yeah, essentially. You had to go toward the more modern things going on and that is new media. If you really look into new media and you look at some of these kids. I was at the races, the drag races in Sonoma with the Red Line Oil guy in the back, because he was one of the big sponsors.

John Dvorak : She was just so full of herself, I actually thought it was very funny. She was a big star. Maybe a decade. That was when everything was popping. Everybody was doing well and there were experts that were explaining what was going on and they did a good job of it.

Over time, there was a couple of things that had happened. I did very few news stories. Everybody wanted to be a columnist, because you got more attention than the other guys. You prime a bunch of analysts. That was what we were always fighting against because we knew about it. Many of the writers were sucked off into a technology company and they got a lot of money. A lot of then disappeare, and then they could never get. This is an interesting group, because I knew almost all of them.

They would get frustrated by what they were seeing, because it was a slow degradation of tech reporting into gizmos, too many gizmos and gadgets. You could see that coming, not enough truth. Now, it allowed people to just start your own publication. John Geddes : How do you fight against that? If we presume that that expertise gives you that additional filter to cut out the bullshit.

John Geddes : If you presume that, how do you fight out against becoming an insider? You should write about it. Not because of their companies and I would never write about the companies, but to get the gossip. Describe this. Who were the relationships between the journalists themselves in the 80s like, versus the 90s, versus now? Was it camaraderie at one point, competition at another?

How did it get? John Dvorak : It never became competition inside of a publication. In other words, to people inside, yeah, actually there was competition, but it was always friendly, good competition. Like competition in a football team, where the guys are trying to be the tight end and they compete. The competition was there in a standard journalistic competition, from what I can tell, in the 80s.

The 90s was getting a little scattered because of the Internet coming along, and then all of a sudden there were people surfing the web, and there were concerns about search engines when AltaVista finally came out with one, and Yahoo had their directories. It created a moment of confusion that settled out and blew up with the dotcom thing when everyone was crazy. This was called Silicon Spin. Silicon Spin was an old-fashioned discussion show that had, there were the two wingmen and I was the guy in the middle.

If you see that today this guy is living in the 70s. Because right now, you should put a guy on one of the sides, then you want to have a group of three, at the most.

Anyway, that was the spot. Brick and mortar is dead, stores are dead and everything is going to be online. They were crazy. The only interesting thing about the show is that I would do this. This is the new economy.

That was giving me. It said to me that insanity had crept into the business at all kinds of levels. I was just seeing it everywhere. I was living in a madhouse. We went into the next decade, , that was when you had to make your move to get out of the craziness because we had a nice crash, which pushed a lot of people out of business.

Journalists had to go work for public relations. John Geddes : Do you think it was because of the money? John Geddes : You were covering a sector, the people you were covering in the course of while you were staying there is a journalists became multimillionaires.

In the 80s and 90s, the kind of money that people make from startups, I remember walking around with Bill Ziff, and an editor friend of mine, Paul Somerson in New York City, wandering around.

This was in the mid to late 80s. This was when Bill Ziff is one of eight billionaires in the world. He shows the true unemployment rate, the true inflation rate, all of the stuff. The true unemployment rate is a lot higher than what they tell us. Anyway, as this billionaire thing became overnight billionaires, overnight billionaires, you start to think how can I leverage this to a billion? It was literally creating havoc with everybody. I remember Jared Cornell, the novelist is a friend of mine.

John Dvorak : A lot of guys see that little thing. What the hell. It drives a lot of people a little nutty. John Geddes : Not to curse this, but it turned from a boast. John Dvorak : It has. For the worse. I have always said, I was doing this from the beginning. I jump in once in a while as a mistake. But from the early days, I have said that they should shut down the Internet and redesign it. What a joker, this guy. I mean, the New York Times is a good example.

But you just have to wonder, at some point when are they going to pull the plug on the print? When they do that, print is still important. They start piling up, especially the Sunday ones or the magazine. It produces guilt.