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John Charles Dvorak (born April 5, 1952 in Los Angeles, California) is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines. Dvorak is also the Vice-President of Mevio (formerly PodShow) and well known for his work for Tech TV.
ak writes for various publications, including PC Magazine (two separate columns since 1986), MarketWatch, BUG Magazine (Croatia), and Info Exame (Brazil).
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Quotations
All I know is that due to Grand Theft Auto, if my children wanted to be car thieves, they would be damn good at it!
On This Week In Tech
Microsoft is dead in the water.
On This Week In Tech
Nobody ever went broke advertising next to a Dvorak column.
PC Magazine Editors Day
Ya I actually have a Playstation 360.
TWiT Episode 31
The Noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this technology succeeding is zilch.
PC Magazine., Sept. 1995.
I don't plug junk.
Business Week Circa 1982
Encyclopedia
John Charles Dvorak (born April 5, 1952 in Los Angeles, California) is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines. Dvorak is also the Vice-President of Mevio (formerly PodShow) and well known for his work for Tech TV.
Periodicals
Dvorak writes for various publications, including PC Magazine (two separate columns since 1986), MarketWatch, BUG Magazine (Croatia), and Info Exame (Brazil). Dvorak has been a columnist for Boardwatch, Forbes, Forbes.com, MacUser, MicroTimes, PC/Computing, Barron's Magazine, Smart Business, and Vancouver Sun. (The MicroTimes column ran under the banner Dvorak's Last Column.) He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and The Philadelphia Inquirer among numerous other publications.
His PC Magazine column is licensed worldwide.
Dvorak created a few tech running jokes — in episode 18 of TWiT (This Week in Tech) he claimed that, thanks to his hosting provider, he "gets no spam".
Books
Dvorak has written or co-authored over a dozen books, including Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of the Osborne Computer Corporation with Adam Osborne and Dvorak's Guide to Desktop Telecommunications in 1990. His latest book is Online! The Book (Prentice Hall PTR, October, 2003) with co-authors Wendy Taylor and Chris Pirillo.
Awards
The Computer Press Association presented Dvorak with the Best Columnist and Best Column awards, and he was also the 2004 and 2005 award winner of the American Business Editors Association's national gold award for best online columns of 2003 and 2004, respectively.
He was the creator and lead judge of the Dvorak Awards (1992 – 1997).
In 2001, he was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.
TV and Online Media
Dvorak was on the start-up team for CNET Networks, appearing on the television show CNET Central. He also hosted a radio show called Real Computing on NPR, as well as a television show on TechTV (formerly ZDTV) called Silicon Spin.
He now appears on Marketwatch TV and is a regular panelist on This Week in Tech, a netcast audio program hosted by Leo Laporte and featuring other former TechTV personalities such as Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron. As of December 2005, that "TWiTcast" regularly ranks among the top 5 at Apple's iTunes Music Store. Dvorak also participated in the only Triangulation podcast, a similar co-hosted technology discussion program. In March 2006, Dvorak started a new show called CrankyGeeks in which he leads a rotating panel of "cranky" tech gurus in discussions of technology news stories of the week.
Mevio hired Dvorak as Vice President & Managing Editor for a new Mevio TECH channel in 2007. He manages content from existing Mevio tech programming as well as hosts the show, "Tech5", where Dvorak discusses the day's tech news in approximately 5 minutes. Dvorak also co-hosts a
podcast with Mevio co-founder Adam Curry called No Agenda. The show is a free flowing conversation about the week's news, happenings in the lives of the hosts and their families, and restaurant reviews from the dinners John and Adam have together when they are in the same city (usually San Francisco). Adam usually has more outlandish opinions of the week's news or world events while Dvorak plays the straight man in the dialogue.
Personal
John C. Dvorak was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and has homes in the San Francisco Bay area and in Washington State. His wife, Mimi Smith-Dvorak, was an occasional writing collaborator. Dvorak's son created a Craigslist aggregation site called Craigsfindr.com (which now redirects to http://savecraigsfindr.com). However, the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, has repeatedly blocked the site. Dvorak is a noted collector of Bordeaux wines and has been a tasting judge at various international events. He started his career as a wine writer. Dvorak has also appeared as a prima donna version of himself with Steve Gibson in the Up in Smoke Video Podcast, a mini sitcom about a cigar shop.
Criticism of Apple Inc.
Dvorak has been a long time critic of Apple Inc., even goading readers with a Mac-bashing column in MacUser magazine.
In July of 2007, on what he called "a sad day for Mac bashers," Dvorak wrote favorably of his experiences using a Mac. He said that compared to a Windows PC, the Mac "gets the job done, albeit more elegantly" and that "the interface is slicker than the PC's." He noted, "I sense that the OS is more solid than Microsoft Windows, but I cannot say why exactly." As for making recommendations for others, he stated that he would rather provide customer service for "most people" by "recommend[ing] a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor."
This was a significant change from his earlier comments.
In 1984 he criticized Apple's inclusion of a mouse with their computers, saying “There is no evidence that people want to use these things.” In 1999, he ridiculed the iBook as “‘girly’”, saying, “It looks too juvenile— something a kid, a little girl, would like. Something you'd get at Toys 'R' Us.” For this he was slammed not only by Mac aficionados, but also by female computing pundit Janelle Brown for reinforcing gender stereotypes. In 2005 he suggested that recent good press about Apple was due to media bias, writing “With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect?” He later predicted that Apple would release a Video iPod in spite of Steve Jobs' denials, suggested that the Mac brand should be discontinued, predicted that Apple would switch to Intel chips, and suggested that Apple might be switching over to Windows and abandoning their Mac OS to save money.
In an interview in June 2006, he explained to Dave Winer that he would bait Mac users in order to increase traffic to his website.
Dvorak has also been outspoken on Apple's iPhone, partially due to the public praise the iPhone received before it reached retail stores. In an op-ed piece for MarketWatch, Dvorak said that Apple could not compete with existing mobile phone companies Nokia and Motorola. He did criticize how he was singled out as an "iPhone basher," because he pointed out that people were making judgment on a product they haven't even used yet. However, after the release of the iPhone, he said that it was a nice device.
Criticism of Palm in relation to Palm Pre announcement
During podcast () he stated that won't change the situation for the Palm. He claims that the company significance will diminish based on the trends on the market.
He wrote on marketwatch.com and predicted the following:
For Palm and RIM to survive, they'll need the Google Android operating system and to remake their own peculiar offerings into applications they can only hope will be sold as value-added features.
External links
- with commentary on news articles, observations on industry trends, and links to web pages of interest.
- Site aggregating all things Dvorak created by his son.
- [Twitter] version of above site.
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- Zinfandel On the Web (abandoned)
- John Dvorak Interviewed on CS Techcast
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