Dvorak Reveals Old Formula, Panic Ensues
I love John Dvorak. One of the driest, caustic, funniest and smartest men ever to write about technology. I love him so much we hired him as a columnist at Forbes. We had a rollicking good evening drinking Forbes wine on the Forbes yacht one balmy summer evening long ago while on a three-hour tour around Manhattan, and he made me laugh. A lot.
Having managed to thoroughly antagonize the Mac-goons a couple times myself in my day, I started spotting my boxer shorts reading his formula at PCMag.com for how to call in the Mac Marines (his classic was calling a Mac “girly”) and then milking the assault for another column or two.
“The Mac itself is apparently the moral equivalent of their mom. I’m surprised that some of these people actually do not weep reading these columns: “Oh! Why does he say such things?””
“The worst of the mob all tell the others to stop reading me and linking to me (a boycott was recently proposed), but they never stop. They are just encouraging it, and they all know it. Then come the personal attacks, as if I were an abortion clinic in Pensacola.”
I especially loved his final zinger at the new black MacBook:
“And just so you know: Yes, I do think the new MacBook is pretty jazzy. And hey, it’s black, just like my ThinkPad! Cool!”
[update: Jim Forbes has discovered the third leg of Dvorak’s Rule of Mac Baiting. 1. Get ’em mad. 2. Do a column on their ire. 3. Occasionally admit you were wrong and get more mileage.]
