John Gruber on Christopher Mims’ “2013 Was a Lost Year for Tech” →
What a sad pile of piss-on-everything cynicism.
Agreed. The rest of Gruber’s article is great, too, especially about the prevalent attitude in today’s tech journalism.
Mims’ article is an amalgamation of many disparate, unrelated complaints. Some of them are valid — NSA, Microsoft, startup culture — but most read like the unreasonable complaints of a tired, petulant writer expecting impossibly frequent miracles.
The words he chose — letdown, stagnate — say more about his state of mind than any particular products. This is all too common in the tech press as writers crash hard from the highs of the 2007–2011 mobile revolution, which has mostly reached a steady state of incremental progress. But as Gruber wrote, incremental progress is great over time.
Mims and most tech pundits seem to want revolutionary new hardware and device categories every year, but hardware has always been the least interesting side of computing. Hardware changes gradually and predictably, with relatively little variation between manufacturers because everyone’s working with the same parts and limitations. It’s a boring commodity. Software and services are much more interesting, have a greater effect on actual usage, and have far more potential for improvement and innovation.