Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst,
leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism
start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and
Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who
quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of
hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a
must-read.“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after
having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post
that neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots
as a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”
Lovely, warm, accurate and fair obituary. This pulled snippet is a great one. Early Android as Chinese takeout is such a deft analogy, and the piece really isn’t about Android specifically but Google institutionally. Not speeds and feeds, but can they make products with a soul? With heart? Om’s pessimism was obvious, and I’d say, prescient.
He had a rare ability to see around corners, and to pick out from
the horde of new companies the ones that were going to make real
change. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging
service, and in 2006 he was the first blogger to write extensively
about Twitter. He was not a fan.
Back in the day Letterman had a recurring bit called “Is This Anything?” They’d bring someone or something on stage and then Dave and Paul would render their up/down judgment: was that anything? The answer, more often than not, was no. The Letterman bit was a gag. But that’s basically what tech journalism is — especially back in the heyday of startups. Every startup believes it’s something and wants the press to think it’s something. Most of the time, it’s not something. Once in a while it is. Om was so goddam good at identifying the somethings.
Long before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political
left and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with
Bloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on
the part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In
the same interview, he criticized the venture capitalist John
Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”
He was right early, and right often. You can say now that everyone knows there’s “an air of amorality” at Facebook institutionally and with Zuckerberg personally. In 2013 that was not a common refrain. Just a year earlier, Apple had added Facebook account integration at the system level in iOS 6.
