06.15.07
an unblinking, adoring eye on microsoft
The short and sweet form of this article; ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, a soi disant tech blogger, reckons that Apple is copying Vista in its new operating system. Okay, blink a few times, shake your head slightly as if attempting to dislodge a small grain of idiocy lodged in your brain, and read on.
I posted earlier this week about how disappointing Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC 2007 was, and I wasn’t exactly alone in this. Tons of tech blogs and news sites criticised the “Stevenote” for its lack of content, bad pacing and general failure to match up to public expectation. It was, unquestionably, something of a miscalculation.
As with any event of this nature, though, the really interesting reactions come from the fringes - the slightly loony vested interests who sit on the edge of the debate. What’s interesting this week is that one of the most clearly biased, unresearched and ignorant pieces I’ve read in the wake of the keynote came not from a tin-foil hat wearing nutter on the outskirts of the tech community, but from a by-lined blogger employed by one of the larger tech sites, ZDnet.
Mary Jo Foley describes her column as “An unblinking eye on Microsoft”, and as you’d expect from an intrepid investigative reporter into the shadowy world of technology, she was clutching her media pass and ready to get to the heart of the truth about the Apple keynote. In the process, she has uncovered a massive conspiracy; Apple’s operating system is copying Microsoft!
You can have a gander at Foley’s take on the whole matter on her ZDnet blog.
Now, the key problem here isn’t so much the dismissal of a whole lot of interesting OS ideas because they’re from the wrong company (she basically says out of hand that Time Machine and Core Animation aren’t important, apparently because she doesn’t understand them). The real problem is that Mary Jo Foley has taken it upon herself to deliver these judgements without doing the slightest bit of research. She has splurged her ideas into a word processor, hasn’t even bothered googling for a few facts and some background info to back up her conclusions, and published it on a blog on a prominent tech site.
This leads to some brilliant howlers, like her apparent belief that Dashboard, Spotlight and so on were actually entirely new features, rolled out in a hurry to counter Vista’s functionality. Five minutes on Wikipedia would have disproved this - and ten minutes spent talking to any one of the 5000 developers who surrounded Ms Foley at the Moscone West Convention Centre would have set her straight on several of her other broken, un-researched assumptions, like her confusion over 64-bit functionality.
I find two things interesting about this whole mess, neither of which reflects particularly well on the editorial hands on the tiller at ZDnet.
Firstly, as someone who edited a business and technology website for nearly five years, I’m astonished that any editor allowed this article onto their publication without demanding that Foley go back and research some of her claims. I’m aware that this is technically a blog, and that ZDnet may have decided that writers’ blogs should be free of editorial oversight; if so, this is a terrible mistake. You cannot absolve yourself of editorial responsibility for blogs, so long as they continue to carry your banner and logo. Any decent editor would have thrown this article over to another contributor with some background in the field for a quick fact-check. That’s how the quality control process works, and ZDnet clearly chose to bypass it.
Secondly, Mary Jo Foley writes a column for ZDnet under the title “An unblinking eye on Microsoft” - suggesting, to me at least, some kind of watchdog role. A perusal of her earlier entries reveals that a caveat is required; Ms Foley’s unblinking eye is often utterly adoring.
Granted, she has a relatively healthy disrespect for some of Microsoft’s more odious marketing antics - the commissioning of biased studies, for example - but her coverage of the company rarely rises above simple, credulous posts about product announcements. Her coverage of other companies, however, is routinely negative. Apple takes something of a hammering; Google, too, attracts ire. In a later entry updating her stance on Leopard (but mostly just bashing the people who mailed her letting her know how retarded her original post was), Foley openly admits to being too set in her Microsoft ways to give any other product a fair chance. She didn’t need any such admission; anyone with the time to read some of her blog efforts already knows.
I always find this kind of individual, and their seeming success, quite surprising. It leads me to wonder if there are any political correspondents out there who are paid to cover a specific party, despite openly admitting to having a preference for that party’s politics. I’ve been accused of bias in the past myself, but at the very least, I can happily say that the allegations swung my way have been even; I’ve had as many accusations of being a Sony fanboy as I’ve had of being a Microsoft fanboy or a Nintendo fanboy, which I think means I’m probably hitting things nicely down the middle of the lane. I find it pretty hard to sympathise with journalists like Foley who take great pride in their bias, and then express annoyance when they’re called up on it.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Mary Jo Foley, journalism, Steve Jobs
