Sun - June 6, 2004 at 09:46 PM in

A Taxonomy of Technology Pundits


Every technology has its pundits and prognosticators. I've filled that role for different technologies at various times. After a few years, you begin to see certain patterns appear over and over:

The Evangelist is the person who sees the virtue in a new technology long before anyone else, and promotes it relentlessly to anyone s/he meets. These are the dreamers, the true believers who not only believe, but want to make sure everyone else believes, too. Evangelists often know more about the technology than anyone else, but sometimes don't know much about competing technologies (except that they suck).

The Blind Evangelist is an evangelist who doesn't realize that his favorite technology is a dead end in the marketplace. Every failed technology has a few of these people, preaching to empty churches. These are the people who bought used Amigas when Commodore went bankrupt, or invested in companies which promoted ATM (the network protocol, not the cash machines) in the late 90's. Blind evangelists often wind up disspirited and/or bankrupt, and never fully understand why their favorite technology failed.

The All-Knowing Oracle is a sort of meta-pundit. Someone who went out on a limb early in his career and got lucky, then started believing his own PR. Makes wild predictions about all sorts of technology, often stretching out decades (or longer). Rarely right, but can have quite a following thanks to his early lucky guesses. Bull markets breed all-knowing oracles, and they usually live until the market crashes.

The Curmudgeon is the opposite of the All-Knowing Oracle. The curmudgeon may be a highly qualified geek, but doesn't believe in any newfangled technology until he's the only one who isn't using it. These are usually the people who tell stories of programming on punch-cards ("Back in those days, whitespace meant something!"). This is the guy who held on to his LP collection until they became collectors' items, and financed his new CD player by selling his lovingly preserved turntable on eBay.

The Whore, as the name implies, sells his opinion to the highest bidder. Whores (that's the polite term--some also call them "analysts" or even "market researchers") are distinguishable by their distinctive clothing: expensive suits, woven silk ties, and polished shoes. Inserting a whore's opinion into a PowerPoint presentation is much like bringing a hired escort to a state dinner: even though everyone knows it was paid for, everyone at the table will politely pretend that more was involved than a mere financial transaction.

The Groupie thinks that anything produced by his or her favorite company must be the best. Groupies are more often associated with niche players (like Apple) than gorillas like Microsoft...but every technology company has a few groupies. Groupies are nice to have, since they tend to be early adopters and trend-setters, but they desperately want the company to reciprocate their feelings. Groupies, as a group, are easily offended by any perceived slight: a typical reaction being "That's how I would expect [insert name of competitor] to behave!"

The Professor is that rarest of all technology pundits: someone who actually and honestly takes the time to think about a new technology and understand what the user actually wants; and then explains what it is all about in terms simple enough for anyone to understand. This is the type of person who will give nuanced opinions like, "This is promising technology, but it really isn't ready for prime-time yet," or "It really won't matter to most people which technology is under the hood of your [PC | digital camera | color printer | horseless carriage] since both competing technologies perform about the same." The Professor can most often be found writing for the Wall Street Journal, and in the form of open-minded IT professionals.

I've been most of these pundits for different technologies over time: I was an evangelist for digital cameras, a blind evangelist for my beloved CrossPad, something of a whore for various telephony technologies, a groupie for Apple, and a professor for the most recent OS wars (Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux).

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