Mossberg, who has just turned 50, fits the profile of the frustrated computer user. He lives on the East Coast. He’s dubious of the rhetoric that hypes the digital age as a philosophical creed rather than just something to make life easier. He’s just a guy with a mulish computer, and he refused to contact his employer’s friendly information-systems techie to help him hook it up. He fixed it himself, but it was annoying. Why shouldn’t a PC work like a refrigerator or a toaster? GE would be out of business by now if it pulled this kind of thing.
This is Mossberg’s persona, but it’s disingenuous, a Columbo act. He’s actually a closet computer wiz who could hold his own in high-tech verbal swordplay with Bill Gates. In fact, he regularly does just that, because he’s arguably the most powerful arbiter of consumer tastes in the computer world today. His weekly Wall Street Journal column stands at the crossroads of the industry’s drive to reach beyond trade-magazine-reading “early adopters” and embrace the mass market. As they try to make the transition–and it’s not going so well right now–they have to get past Mossberg. Call him the Butcher of Bandwidth.
Mossberg’s mantra can be summed up in the very first sentence of his very first Journal column, back in 1991: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault.” He makes it a point to remember that most computer users, at their homes and small businesses, don’t have high-speed phone connections, training seminars and technoid colleagues waiting in the wings to get their equipment back online again.
Industry types don’t always like his message, but they pay attention. Product managers from the Silicon Valley make pilgrimages to his door to pitch their latest offerings, because his verdicts can have a huge impact. When Mossberg recently gave a favorable review to a CD-ROM game for grown-ups, “You Don’t Know Jack,” sales leaped that week from 1,800 units to 12,000. “No one could find one on the shelves,” says Julie Wainwright, chairman of Berkeley Systems, which produced it. “He kick-started our product,” she says. Journal reporters often move stock prices when they report news; Mossberg sent shares of CNET soaring nearly 40 percent last December just because he happened to like its online news service.
Mossberg, who’s been at the Journal for 27 years, was covering the Pentagon for the paper when he got interested in computers. “It was my hobby,” he said. “And later on I realized the industry had a problem when everybody had to have it as a hobby. You shouldn’t have to have the commitment of a hobbyist to own a computer.”
Techno-elite: Mossberg’s attitude doesn’t always endear him to the digerati. He’s been called “brain dead” in certain Web colloquies. He flames right back. “I make no bones about it,” he says. “I’m an enemy of what I call “computer theology.’ There’s a class conflict out there. There’s a techno-elite that lives in a different world.” What makes the problem worse is that this techno-elite includes just about everybody who works at a high-tech company, so they can be out of touch with the concerns of typical consumers. “I’m not singling them out; they’re a good company,” he says, “but if you walked into Netscape headquarters with a plain old modem from CompUSA they’d think it was a garage-door opener.”
Mossberg says things haven’t improved much. The nightmare of DOS may be gone, but the Internet has brought a host of new terrors, errors and crashes. Many believe the computer industry needs to change its culture if it wants to attract new users. PCs have penetrated 37 percent of all homes in the United States, according to Odyssey, a San Francisco research firm. But growth is slowing, and computer ownership increased only slightly in the six months ending in January. The percentage of computer buyers who are first-timers has shrunk to 32 percent from 49 percent a year ago. Many in the industry think low prices will lure new converts. “But it’s not price, it’s price for what,” says Odyssey’s president, Nick Donatiello. “It’s value, knowing that what you buy will last a while and not be too complicated to use easily.” Mossberg believes that the answer for a lot of people is a simpler machine. He advocates a kind of “information appliance” that can send e-mail and surf the Net–a line of thinking that gives much of the computer industry fits. “I’m saying, start over,” he says. Meanwhile, Mossberg is going a bit more mass-market himself. He and New York Times writer Stephen Manes plan to host a program on public TV this fall, “The Digital Duo,” that will be a kind of Siskel and Ebert show of the high-tech world. Instead of thumbs up or down, they’ll have “save” and “delete.”
