“It’s widely agreed that columnist Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal is the ‘dean’ of tech journalists. He’s been at it as long as anyone, and his reviews merit serious attention from almost every corner of the industry. He’s even among the few on Apple’s preferred lists of journalists to get an early look at their new products. That’s why Mossberg, David Pogue and a handful of others manage to get those stories out sometimes before the new Apple gear goes on sale,” Gene Steinberg writes for TechNightOwl.
“When it comes to Mossberg, one of the reasons he’s earned special attention is the result of the calm, even-handed approach he takes in his reviews. It doesn’t hurt that he works for the most respected financial newspaper on the planet,” Steinberg writes. “So you can expect that when he wrote his review of Windows 7, people took notice. When he said that Windows, at long last, comes especially close to the Mac OS in terms of performance, features and reliability, certainly you have to consider what he says seriously.”
Steinberg writes, “On the other hand, nobody is infallible… I am extremely disappointed with the way Mossberg handled this particular piece, and it’s not because I’m a Mac user and consider Microsoft products mostly second rate. When you look behind the conclusions and examine the facts, you wonder if Mossberg isn’t seriously understating his conclusions and the distinctions he found between the two operating systems… This isn’t the first time Mossberg has been a little too enthusiastic about a Microsoft release. You see… he also raved in a similar fashion about Windows Vista back in 2007.”
Full article here.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune (crediting reader Jon T. of Cardiff, Wales) on two quotes from Mossberg’s Windows Vista and Windows 7 reviews:
“After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced.” — Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18, 2007
“After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced.” — Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 2009
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Windows rots. And we don’t just mean that’s inferior to our Macs, but that also over time, in the hands of everyday users, it clogs up, slows down, and generally deteriorates. Let’s give Windows 7 the time it needs for its inherent issues to begin showing up.