From Microsoft to the iPhone, getting technology right for 25 years

This story is part of CNET at 25We’re celebrating a quarter of a century of industrial technology and our role in telling you its story.

Editor’s Note: As part of CNET’s 25th birthday, we are publishing a series of guest columns from former CNET executives, editors and reporters. Below is Dan’s biography.

In 1995, I worked in Boston as editor-in-chief of PCWeek, the leading weekly news in the computer industry. It was part of the Ziff-Davis stable with technology publications and young websites.

In the summer, Ziff-Davis made the decision to combine all locations under one roof called ZDNet. I signed up as editor-in-chief and shepherd to integrate all content from all publications into a new type of technical information resource that was specially developed for the Internet. The idea was to bring the ink printed on pages into a digital world that was unlimited in content.

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Around the same time, CNET launched San Francisco, an emerging TV-Internet hybrid that deals with established media at the interface of technology and culture.

Over the next five years, ZDNet and CNET became archrivals that competed for eyeballs, improved each other, and grew rapidly as technology penetrated deeper into our lives. In July 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, the two rivals decided that it was better to join forces than to fight to death in a traumatized, shrinking advertising market. CNET acquired ZDNet for $ 1.6 billion, and over the next 14 years I have had many of the best years of my career as a journalist.

CNET and ZDNet acted as two different brands and together had a broad portfolio of technology-oriented websites that address different target groups, from IT managers and gamers to technology news fans and product fanatics. The powerhouse of talented journalists, product experts, video producers and developers has pushed the creative boundaries of the new technology-driven century across print, online and radio – and has also inspired a host of competing publications and a new generation of technology journalists.

We have released dozens of big messages that record boom and bust cycles, the rise of the cloud, the colonization of the Internet, and the birth of a tech universe that is now ruled by Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. CNET could manufacture or break products with the most trusted ratings in the industry. ZDNet created one of the first blog networks with dozens of the most insightful writers and thinkers to record the tech industry. When CBS acquired CNET in 2008, we brought CBS News into the digital age.

There were many highlights during my tenure at CNET. The launch of the iPhone on January 9, 2007 is a kind of highlight of all technological innovations of the past 50 years. But it was mostly about working with a group of people who have a deep passion for technology and do it right.

Dan Farber is currently SVP for strategic communication at Salesforce. Before Salesforce, he worked as a journalist for 35 years and was editor-in-chief of ZDNet, CNET News and CBSNews.com. He was also the editor-in-chief of Ziff-Davis’ flagship computer news publications PC Week and MacWeek, founding editor of MacWorld magazine, and a member of the editorial teams at PC World and PC Magazine.