It's actually a neat story. Infoworld magazine made their authors write under pen names to prevent them from building up personal brand and moving to different publications.

Mark Stephens built up a following under the Cringely name then left in a financial dispute and wanted to keep the name. There was a lawsuit, for a while there were two people writing as Cringely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

> Infoworld magazine made their authors write under pen names

More specifically, a number of tech pubs at the time ran sort of industry insider columns written under pen games. This was partly for practical reasons--they were sort of tech gossip columns and it worked better for the writer's real name not to be widely known. But you're right that it also allowed the magazines to rotate through writers. Another one was Spencer F. Katt at PC Week. There was also a longtime one in a DEC trade magazine although I forget the column's name there.

ADDED: A long time ago, Wired ran a profile on Stephens/Cringely: https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/

This is required reading for anyone on HN...

https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-C...

...more for fun historical perspective than anything else. Lots of great anecdotes and stories about founders. The book became a PBS series that become a movie with Noah Wiley as Steve Jobs. And useful insight:

"As inventive organizations grow and mature, they often convert themselves into maintenance organizations, dedicated to doing revisions of formerly inventive products and boring as hell for the original programmers who were used to living on adrenalin rushes and junk food. This transition time, from inventive to maintenance, is a time of crisis for these companies and their founders."

Short story: he was a big deal back in the day, has had a couple pretty big stories but these days he's much less influential.

Now he blogs very infrequently, largely concentrating on his slightly-creepy obsession with IBM. The fact that he so easily gets duped by scammers pretending to be Google[1] and then actually blogs about it is quite indicative of how far his finger is from the pulse of technology.

So, no, you're not missing anything.

[1] https://www.cringely.com/2015/09/07/evil-google-waiting-on-l...

His essays have been submitted 40 times as HN stories in the last two years (most with more than one person submitting). I have gotten useful insights from all that I have read. If you are going to be so dismissive you might at least give us your recommendations for who has a better bird's eye view of current technology.

I think he's reasonable enough although he doesn't write a lot. The world has changed to the degree that it's probably hard to point to a generalist weekly writer who is the equivalent of the columnists at the old weekly computer magazines. Today, you tend to get writers who are more specialized in AWS, IoT, virtualization, cloud, or whatever. And most of them are consultants, vendors, etc. rather than full-time journalists.

I think there's a pretty good chance that said article was written in jest, and Bob then saw all the comments that didn't get that, and decided to go along with it by reverse-trolling/answering the comments as if he wrote it seriously...

I appreciate articles with his take and scope. Better to have some variety than endless articles about which serverless lambda functions are the best.

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires is his and is pretty good.

I must admit that the part with Steve Balmer talking about KLOCs is funny and true https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0&feature=youtu.be

I'd only heard of him years ago because he made a TV programme about self-building a plane [1], which I think ended up with him building a kit rather than designing it from scratch. I found him amusing when watching it, although I don't know anyone else who has seen it, and info on it seems scarce. I'd wager it was shown on Channel 4 here in the UK, but I could just be making most of it up!

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164814/

I remember this documentary. It basicly chronicled him setting out too design and build his own airplane which devolved into chaos. It was kind of painfull too watch. In the end he had too purchase a kit plane and get outside help building it too simply have a show that ending in some form of success. An interesting example of how projects can go wrong. I can't remember the name of it though...

Short answer: no one knows. He, or someone using that identity, has been hanging around technology media since the dim mists of time. Sometimes insightful, but no good information on whether that is pure chance or not exists.

Long answer: https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/