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Inside the Death Star

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  We called CMP’s headquarters the Death Star. The three-story, green-tinted glass building (above) at 600 Community Dr. in Manhasset, Long Island, looked like a slice of Darth Vader’s cold metal planet. And for its far-flung crew of independent and skeptical journalists scattered around the world, it felt regimented. I planted myself in a windowless inside corner office on the third floor as the company was rising into its zenith. At the other end of the building, CMP’s top pub, Computer Reseller News aka CRN , was making good money and getting noticed. It routinely got interviews with top tech executives. The EE Times crew considered those folks the stuffed shirts at companies where savvy but unsung engineers designed and built market-making products. CMP was on the brink of launching its first big consumer title, Windows Magazine , filled with tips for using PCs. By contrast, OEM Magazine would be small potatoes despite Girish’s high hopes. I was happy to toil away ou...
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A Time of Convergence

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From about 1990 to 2008 the tech industry exuded a palpable sense that breakthroughs were coming, that one or multiple Next Big Things were just over the horizon. It was just a question of who would be the first to see and seize the opportunities. The PC was clearly coming on strong as a next-big thing, but it had yet to fulfill its potential of delivering truly powerful, yet easy-to-use and inexpensive products that rode a fast, reliable network. And we all wanted at least one product that would fit in a pocket, but it was unclear if it would come from the PC industry, phone makers or consumer electronics giants. At the same time, consumer electronics companies were pushing graphics and displays to the hilt in pursuit of more realistic game consoles and TVs. The gaming sector, for its part, was on a course to overtake movies and TV as the largest entertainment market. Meanwhile, service providers were racing to retool their networks to be both fast and smart (digital); most were still...
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An Omen, an Aide-de-Camp and a Gatekeeper

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One day while we were still tinkering with what departments and columns OEM might include, a bombshell landed on my desk, Wired Magazine . It was big and intoxicatingly beautiful. Its first issue had perhaps three times the plunk value the best edition of OEM would ever have. Its design was what our managing editor, Tim Moran, would call outre. It was as “out there” as a jazz riff. And the content rose above the secular corporate scrimmages of convergence OEM aimed to cover. Wired was about tech culture and lifestyle. Its first issues profiled an edgy science fiction author, included stories written by a New York Times reporter, and sold at newsstands for $5 a pop. It was aiming to be the New Yorker of the tech crowd. By contrast, our ambitions for OEM seemed provincial. As one commentator later wrote , Wired “was almost immediately considered an index of the zeitgeist of the 1990s.” I felt humbled, jealous and deflated. Just as I was gearing up for the big time in tech reporting...
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A Cast of Characters

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Our offices were arranged in a square with a bullpen for the production crew in the center. Sometimes I’d walk around to think or take a break from my screen and check in with one colleague or another.  Greg Lupion’s office was a favorite stop. He was a good listener, and quick to laugh, especially when stress was high. Greg was Moran’s right-hand man. All the copy and production editors reported to him, and they were glad they did because he was a great manager, supportive and, amid the chaos, a font of calm, common sense and good humor. One door down was perhaps the strongest reporter in the company. Alex Wolfe sat with a quiet intensity behind his terminal, chewing a plastic coffee stir into a pulp. Like an overworked IBM salesman, he wore the same faded blue suit, sans tie, nearly every day. Alex almost single handedly put EE Times on the map. His biggest scoop was an exclusive about a bug in Intel’s highest profile microprocessor, the Pentium, the first chip to shed an x86 nu...
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