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

This story becomes part of CNET at 25, commemorating a quarter century of market tech and our function in informing you its story.

Editor’s note: As part of CNET’s 25th birthday, we’re releasing a series of visitor columns by previous CNET leaders, editors and press reporters. You’ll discover Dan’s bio listed below.

In 1995, I was operating in Boston as the editor-in-chief of PCWeek, the leading computer system market news weekly. It belonged to the Ziff-Davis stable of innovation publications and recently established sites.

In the summertime, Ziff-Davis decided to bring all the websites under a single umbrella called ZDNet. I signed on as the editor-in-chief and feline herder, charged with bringing all the material from throughout the publications into a brand-new type of tech info resource purpose-built for the web. The concept was to bring the ink printed on pages into a digital world that was unbounded for material.

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Around the same time, CNET was starting up in San Francisco, an upstart TV-internet hybrid taking on establishment media at the intersection of technology and culture. 

Over the next five years, ZDNet and CNET became archrivals, competing for eyeballs, making each other better and growing at a fast pace as technology burrowed deeper into our lives. In July 2000, as the dot-com bubble was bursting, the two rivals decided they were better off combining forces than fighting to the death in a traumatized, shrinking market for advertising. CNET acquired ZDNet for $1.6 billion in stock, and for the next 14 years I had many of the best years of my career in journalism.

Operating as two distinct brands, CNET and ZDNet together had a broad portfolio of tech-oriented sites addressing different audiences, from IT executives and gamers to tech news devotees and product fanatics. The powerhouse of talented journalists, product experts, video producers and developers pushed the creative boundaries of the new technology-driven century across print, online and broadcast — and also inspired a flock of competing publications and a new generation of tech journalists.

We broke dozens of big news stories, chronicled the boom and bust cycles, the rise of the cloud, the colonization of the internet and the birth of a tech universe now ruled by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. CNET could make or break products with the most trusted reviews in the industry. ZDNet created one of the first blog networks, featuring dozens of the most insightful writers and thinkers chronicling 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 Jan. 9, 2007, stands out as a kind of culmination of all the technology innovation over the last 50 years. But it was mostly working with a group of people deeply passionate about technology and getting it right.

Dan Farber is currently SVP of Strategic Communication at Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, he spent 35 years as a journalist, serving as editor-in-chief of ZDNet, CNET News and CBSNews.com. He was also the editor-in-chief at Ziff-Davis’ flagship computing news publications, PC Week and MacWeek, a founding editor at MacWorld magazine, and a member of the editorial staff of PC World and PC Magazine.