Om Malik

Yes, somehow his this particular essay landed in my inbox middle of May, beautully insightful one and an emotional one. I for some reason saved it as I liked it so much. Did not know it had been written from ICU. https://om.co/2026/05/26/the-copy-and-the-guru/#respond

"My favorite thing Om wrote was actually an interview with Brunello Cucinelli in 2015. And to this day, I think it’s the single best thing you can read on running a business. Better than any book, better than any article." -Jason Fried https://om.co/2015/04/27/brunello-cucinelli-2/

So sad. :( Om was off my radar for the last 10 years ago, and then I recently encountered an article he wrote (https://om.co/2023/02/05/why-modern-leica-m-is-a-great-landscape-camer… about his adoption of Leica M cameras. He had a wonderful eye: https://www.photosbyom.com/

I paused to read whenever a new Om’s essay popped up in the RSS feed; for me, Om was an uniquely observant voice of tech, who never compromised and always looked at the world from a human perspective. This has been one of my favorite ones, reminding us to simply remain human in the face of incentive systems pushing us away from that goal: https://om.co/2026/04/08/banksy-satoshi-the-unmasking-impulse/ Om was attentive to details and generous to share - when he discovered my weather app (https://x.com/om/status/1579948290745176064), he was so kind as to write a whole article about it, without me asking for it in any way: https://om.co/2022/10/11/weathergraph/ I was so proud to be able to send Om a lifetime license. I wish he had gotten several more decades of use out of it. Thank you, Om!

This was his last post: https://om.co/2026/06/08/taking-a-few-days-off/ He seemed to know that something wasn’t right. I really loved his writing. Rest in peace.

I had only briefly heard about him in the past, but it's sad to hear he passed away. Revisiting some of his old writings, I see he was deeply a humanist, and I love that. I especially liked https://om.co/2026/06/07/the-myth-the-mythos-and-the-man/

It's an excellent real world critique of Hsieh's ‘Delivering Happiness’ holacracy ethos. https://om.co/2020/11/28/tony-hseih-rip/

I would say that the plugin offerings is key to its success. Even if I often criticize my wordpress installation I prefer to install a plugin in one click than spend a lot of time at the html/css/js level. Beyond that I couldn't understand their product feature priorities: no headings in their wysiwyg editor, no good themes. I was looking to something like http://om.co which is wordpress but using commercial themes not available for the general public.

25% of the top 1000 websites are blocking OpenAI from crawling: https://originality.ai/ai-bot-blocking I am betting hundreds of thousands, rising to millions more little sites, will start blocking/gating this year. AI companies might license from big sources (you can see the blocking percentage went down), but they will be missing the long tail, where a lot of great novel training data lives. And then the big sites will realize the money they got was trivial as agents start to crush their businesses. Bill Gross correctly calls this phase of AI shoplifting. I call it the Napster-of-Everything (because I am old). I am also betting that the courts won't buy the "fair use" interpretation of scraping, given the revenues AI companies generate. That means a potential stalling of new models until some mechanism is worked out to pay knowledge creators. (And maybe nothing we know of now will work for media: https://om.co/2024/12/21/dark-musings-on-media-ai/) Oh, and yes, I love generative AI and would be willing to pay 100x to access it... P.S. Hope is not a strategy, but hoping something like ProRata.ai and/or TollBits can help make this self-sustainable for everyone in the chain

It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit. The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions. Here's some people to get you started: On Malik (some interesting photography too): https://om.co/ Anil Dash (appreciates a good Prince pun): https://www.anildash.com/ Judith Butler, just about anything they put out in public. bell hooks (deceased, but has a lot worth reading) Adam Savage (lots of good life advice in Q&As): https://www.youtube.com/@tested Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): https://wilwheaton.net/ Michael Rosenbaum (played a solid Lex Luthor and now does great interviews): https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (from Enterprise to interview show): https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/

Nostalgic post from back in the day when he wrote an RIP post for a friend, Dean Allen. https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/

"I like to write like a human, steering clear of jargon and B-school speak." https://om.co/about/ https://om.co/2020/07/30/write-like-a-human/

Very sad reading his penultimate blog post: https://om.co/2026/06/08/taking-a-few-days-off/

We live in an era where attention matters more than reality. Chronically online CEOs are aware of this. Om Malik has been writing about this recently, especially regarding OpenAI / Altman [1], but you can see it everywhere. 1 - https://om.co/2026/02/02/openai-and-the-announcement-economy/

A couple of reviews: - https://om.co/2024/05/18/daylight-tablet/ - https://arun.is/blog/daylight-tablet/

Om Malik (https://om.co/2023/12/14/why-vision-pro-will-change-photography/) wants us all to believe that family movie nights will be with everyone sitting in the couch all watching on their Vision Pros. He sees it as an existential threat to the movie theater. How do you share popcorn on the couch all plugged in? And that’s after your average American home with its 2.2 children lay out $14,000+ for their Apple tax. Sorry, Om, I’m not seeing that.

https://textpattern.com/weblog/memories-of-dean-allen https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/ https://daringfireball.net/2018/01/dean_allen

https://om.co/2023/03/21/amazon-shuts-down-dpreview/ > The saddest part of the shutdown is Amazon’s decision to keep the site in “read-only mode for a limited period” after the shutdown on April 10th. That is a shame considering how valuable a resource has been for the internet from the beginning. It is even more disappointing because Amazon is the largest cloud provider in the world, and letting this live on wouldn’t even cost them a damn thing.

That's me. I started with Radio UserLand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_UserLand), but later used the early version of Textpattern. I hadn't looked at Textpattern in a long-time, so I went searching, only to discover Dean Allen had passed away (https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/). I'm glad the software lives on.

A week ago we discussed Om Malik's article "Camera sales are falling sharply". I am one of those people who now does not upgrade his camera, nor use it any more, as much as I like it. I use my smartphone, albeit with some aftermarket Moment wide- and fish-eye lenses on it. This phone makes total sense to me. The money I used to spend on cameras and lenses will be captured by the smartphone companies. https://om.co/2019/09/03/camera-sales-are-falling-sharply/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875544

If only social media was the worst.... see Juul Labs: https://om.co/2018/07/25/juul-stinks/

From Om Malik: https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/

Om Malik just published "A Statement about Gigaom" to his personal blog. http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/

Probably would be better to link this to the original post (http://om.co/2012/04/05/the-of-course-principle-of-design/) rather than a short Daring Fireball excerpt.

Alas https://om.co/2026/06/08/taking-a-few-days-off/

"Large companies are somewhat like me - once they get used to a certain behavior, they develop a certain culture and a set of procedures, processes and a work environment that defines them and their future. These define their corporate DNA. It is hard to change. You can't buy new DNA, and companies can't acquire their way into new corporate cultures. Furthermore, companies that lack that self-awareness of their DNA and behaviors, in the end, find themselves extinct. The Corporate DNA DNA contains the genetic instructions used to build out the cells that make up an organism. I have often argued that companies are very much like living organisms, comprised of the people who work there. What companies make, how they sell and how they invent are merely an outcome of the people who work there. They define the company." source: https://om.co/2011/02/11/change-is-good-but-its-also-really-hard/ "You can't buy new DNA and companies can't acquire their way into new corporate cultures." - Om Malik Is there any other way a company could acquire "new DNA"? 151 "virus" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)" virus n 1: (virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein diff -q googledna.2018 googledna.1998 || cat googledna.1998 "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search…

I wonder if the author (Om Malik) has revised his thinking on a related matter: http://om.co/2016/04/25/should-you-publish-on-facebook-first/ > My parting comment (which he included in the final piece) was that if I were to start a publication, it would be on Facebook (perhaps as a Facebook page). Today I learned that Vox Media is going to launch Circuit Breaker, a gadget blog, as a Facebook-only publication. (It will also have it as a section of The Verge on the web. I call this a web-based backup/archive.) > Despite hand-wringing by traditonalists, I believe Vox’s decision is bold and the right one: In the post-browser-only world, it makes perfect sense to go where the audience lives. I am not clear how well it will monetize this effort. After all, Facebook is a selfish partner when it comes to monetization. At least The Verge/Vox is savvy enough to manage a workflow that pushes to both Facebook and the Web...but I imagine prioritizing FB means doing much less A/B testing and other optimizations that are needed to create a refined Web product.