Computing's Columbo

THE OTHER DAY WALTER MOSSBERG was on his hands and knees on the floor, looking up at his new office computer. The damn thing wasn't converting files from another machine. Typical--and, of course, familiar to most civilians who own computers.

Mossberg, who has just turned 50, fits the profile of the frustrated computer user. He lives on the East Coast. He's dubious of the rhetoric that hypes the digital age as a philosophical creed rather than just something to make life easier. He's just a guy with a mulish computer, and he refused to contact his employer's friendly information-systems techie to help him hook it up. He fixed it himself, but it was annoying. Why shouldn't a PC work like a refrigerator or a toaster? GE would be out of business by now if it pulled this kind of thing.

This is Mossberg's persona, but it's disingenuous, a Columbo act. He's actually a closet computer wiz who could hold his own in high-tech verbal swordplay with Bill Gates. In fact, he regularly does just that, because he's arguably the most powerful arbiter of consumer tastes in the computer world today. His weekly Wall Street Journal column stands at the crossroads of the industry's drive to reach beyond trade-magazine-reading "early adopters" and embrace the mass market. As they try to make the transition--and it's not going so well right now--they have to get past Mossberg. Call him the Butcher of Bandwidth.

Mossberg's mantra can be summed up in the very first sentence of his very first Journal column, back in 1991: "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn't your fault." He makes it a point to remember that most computer users, at their homes and small businesses, don't have high-speed phone connections, training seminars and technoid colleagues waiting in the wings to get their equipment back online again.

Industry types don't always like his message, but they pay attention. Product managers from the Silicon Valley make pilgrimages to his door to pitch their latest offerings, because his verdicts can have a huge impact. When Mossberg recently gave a favorable review to a CD-ROM game for grown-ups, "You Don't Know Jack," sales leaped that week from 1,800 units to 12,000. "No one could find one on the shelves," says Julie Wainwright, chairman of Berkeley Systems, which produced it. "He kick-started our product," she says. Journal reporters often move stock prices when they report news; Mossberg sent shares of CNET soaring nearly 40 percent last December just because he happened to like its online news service.

Mossberg, who's been at the Journal for 27 years, was covering the Pentagon for the paper when he got interested in computers. "It was my hobby," he said. "And later on I realized the industry had a problem when everybody had to have it as a hobby. You shouldn't have to have the commitment of a hobbyist to own a computer."