What's with Steve Gillmor?

In going through my feeds, I’ve been linked to two of Steve’s recent articles: Beep beep and Size still matters.

Before I started reading the first article, I was thinking: I’m about to read a well-reasoned essay that’s logically put together. Halfway through, I started thinking: What is this guy trying to say? When I finished, I was thinking: How is this guy a professional writer?!?!

First of all, as far as I know, “Marc” Lucovsky’s first name is Mark. But that’s relatively trivial.

Read this paragraph and tell me if it isn’t just rambling for the sake of dropping hot names in tech:

What Google had to offer was Gmail, a huge server farm, and a burgeoning software-as-a-service architecture in waiting. Gmail neatly sidestepped the Passport rathole that pulled Hailstorm under, and Skype reassured some of us that we weren’t trading one monoculture for another. And in a few hours Steve Jobs will cut to the chase with an iPod phone that will trigger the last push (with or without the carriers) to a muni WiFi/EV-DO mesh network.

Passport rathole? What do you call Google Accounts? How does Skype have anything to do with Microsoft, WinFX and hailStorm? Steve Jobs, iPod phone, and muni WiFi/EV-DO mesh network?!?!

Then his conclusion that Office’s days are over, even in the enterprise. Umm… what planet are you living on? Besides Google, what IT department is going to hack on a calendar, wireless reminders, and use RSS and WebClips for document review?

Oh and the case study about her daughter? Yes, GMail is an effective replacement for a desktop e-mail client. Too bad it doesn’t have any calendaring. And your daughter doesn’t need a word processor? Really? Next time she has to write up a report for school, are you really going to have her print out a GMail draft or a blog entry and turn it in?

At this point, I had to conclude that Mr. Gillmor has no clue what the heck he’s talking about.

Then I get linked to the second article by Dave Winer. I saw the name Steve Gillmor and thought: hmmm, maybe I’ll give this guy another chance… oops!

You didn’t go to PDC this year, so what? Hundreds of thousands of developers around the world didn’t go to PDC but they’ll still be using the technologies they discussed there this year. Who’s out of the loop Steve?

And yes, Steve Jobs is a better showman and marketer than Steve Ballmer/Bill Gates. Is that news?

And lastly, if you want to talk about discussions you had with Scoble and Dave Winer or regurgitate ideas from Om and Russ Beattie, at least link to them. How is it that you have an article with no new ideas and not a single link?

In a conversation I had with Terry about bad tech writers nowadays, he pointed out a very important observation: to succeed in media today, you just need eyeballs. It doesn’t matter if you’re stupid and wrong, all you have to do is stir up the pot every once in a while and people will read it.

Ah, so unfortunately true.

P.S. Hey ZD Net, you want to get some good eyeballs on your site? How about becoming a tech-centric blog aggregator or republishing good articles written on the blogosphere? You could probably pay these bloggers less than you’re paying your staff and they’d almost certainly put out better and more relevant content.