- John C. Dvorak
-
John C. Dvorak 
John C. Dvorak, July 2007Born April 5, 1952
Los Angeles, California, U.S.Residence San Francisco Bay area
WashingtonNationality American Alma mater University of California, Berkeley Occupation columnist, host, vice-president Website Channel Dvorak
Dvorak Uncensored Blog
Cranky Geeks
Tech5
No Agenda
TWiT (This Week in Tech)John C. Dvorak (born April 5, 1952 in Los Angeles, California) is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing.[1] 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. He has also gained some notoriety for making predictions that have turned out to be spectacularly off-target.[2][3][4]
Contents
Personal life and background
John Charles Dvorak was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California.[5] He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in history, with a minor in chemistry,[6] and has homes in the San Francisco Bay area and Port Angeles, in Washington State. He is married to Mimi Smith-Dvorak.
Dvorak is a skilled BBQ and grilling enthusiast, noted collector of Bordeaux wines and has been a tasting judge at various international events. He started his career as a wine writer.[7]
Dvorak obtained a technician class amateur (ham) radio license, callsign KJ6LNG, in November 2010.
Writing career
Periodicals
Dvorak has written for various publications, including InfoWorld, 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, MacMania Networks, 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."[8]
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, Dvorak's Guide to PC Telecommunications in 1992, Dvorak's Guide to OS/2 in 1993, and Dvorak Predicts in 1994. 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 and later 'Technically Speaking' on NPR, as well as a television show on TechTV (formerly ZDTV) called Silicon Spin. Dvorak is currently a voice on the podcast "No Agenda".
He now appears on Marketwatch TV and is a regular panelist on This Week in Tech, a podcast audio and now video 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 led a rotating panel of "cranky" tech gurus in discussions of technology news stories of the week. The last episode (No. 237) aired on September 22, 2010.
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, although the show has been out of production since late 2010.[9] 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 is intended to play the straight man in the dialogue.
Since early 2011, John has been one of the featured "CoolHotNot Tech Xperts," along with Chris Pirillo, Jim Louderback, Dave Graveline, Robin Raskin, Dave Whittle, Steve Bass, and Cheryl Currid. At CoolHotNot's web site, Dvorak shares his "Loved List" of favorite consumer electronics, his "Wanted List" of tech products he'd like to try, and his "Letdown List" of tech products he found disappointing.[10]
John now hosts the show X3 which like the defunct Tech 5 is a short tech focused cast, but now in a video format together with two additional "pundits".
Controversy
Dvorak's pithy style often attracts critics who point out his frequent—and occasionally egregious—errors of prediction. Dvorak's most famous prediction came in 1984 as a writer for the San Francisco Examiner: "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things."[11]
Another such example is his 2007 advice to Apple about the iPhone - "If [Apple's] smart it will call the iPhone a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures. [... ] It should do that immediately before it's too late." in his 2007 article for Marketwatch [12]
References
- ^ Lewis, Peter H. (1993-04-25). "Sound Bytes; 'Take No Prisoners,' A Bold Wordsmith Says". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CEEDD143BF936A15757C0A965958260. Retrieved 2010-05-06.
- ^ Philip Elmer-DeWitt (12-Jan-2009: 10:10 AM ET). "Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac". CNN Money. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/01/12/jan-1984-how-critics-reviewed-the-mac/. "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don't want one of these new fangled devices."
- ^ John C. Dvorak (17-Jan-1999). "The Looming Cable Modem Fiasco". PC Magazine (archive at Web.Archive.org). http://web.archive.org/web/20000118075802/www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1415/pcm00059.htm. "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."
- ^ John Dvorak (28-March-2007 7:18 p.m. EDT). "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone". MarketWatch. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-iphone.
- ^ "John C. Dvorak". Smart Computing Encyclopedia. Smart Computing. http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/dictionary/detail.asp?guid=&searchtype=1&DicID=17862&RefType=Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-04-25.
- ^ http://www.twit.tv/190
- ^ Wired | Issue 2.02 | Street Myths: John C. Dvorak (February, 1994)
- ^ Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorak, Steve Gibson, Robert Heron, David Prager, Roger Chang, Bob Young, Mike Lazazzera (2005). This Week in Tech Episode 18 (TV-Series). California: This Week in Tech. http://www.twit.tv/18.
- ^ "PodShow, Inc. Taps John C. Dvorak to Launch PodShow TECH". http://pressroom.mevio.com/2007/05/23/podshow-inc-taps-john-c-dvorak-to-launch-podshow-tech/. Retrieved 2007-05-25.
- ^ "CoolHotNot Tech Xperts Team". http://www.coolhotnot.com/techxperts/. Retrieved 2011-03-03.
- ^ . http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/01/12/jan-1984-how-critics-reviewed-the-mac/.
- ^ . http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-iphone.
External links
Listen to this article (info/dl)
This audio file was created from a revision of John C. Dvorak dated 2005-12-11, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)More spoken articles- John C. Dvorak's blog with commentary on news articles, observations on industry trends, and links to web pages of interest.
- John C. Dvorak's Channel Site aggregating all things Dvorak created by his son.
- Channel Dvorak Twitter [Twitter] version of above site.
- John C. Dvorak's column - PC Magazine
- John C. Dvorak's Inside Track - PC Magazine
- John C. Dvorak's Second Opinion - MarketWatch
- Official short bio
- John C. Dvorak's Universal Home Page and Personal Portal
- John C. Dvorak's wine tasting website Zinfandel On the Web (abandoned)
- CrankyGeeks official site
- John Dvorak Interviewed on CS Techcast Episode 20
- Dvorak interview on Tech Talk for Families
- No Agenda, a Podcast he does with Adam Curry.
- Dvorak's current list of best, most wanted, and worst tech products
Categories:- American journalists
- American bloggers
- American columnists
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- Living people
- TechTV
- American podcasters
- 1952 births
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
