The latest entry in the fake diary of Steve Jobs is an excellent rant about why Dell will not bounce back. I agree with his conclusions, but I like it mainly because it opens with this hilariously bitchy paragraph:

I love Charles Cooper of CNET and I respect the fact that he's got to print so many column inches per week in order to earn his paycheck but I have to take issue with his latest effort (see here) where he tries to argue that while Dell looks like crap today, in fact Dell could bounce back just the way Apple did. Coop is light on details and specifics and just sticks to the argument that "times change" and that "Dell has bounced back from previous stumbles so who knows?" This is what passes for "news analysis" at CNET? I'm sorry but the article is glib and facile and, frankly, this kind of hollow pap is the reason CNET itself is headed for the dustheap.

This made me laugh, but c|net isn't doomed. It's just a low-margin magazine business, and always will be. You certainly can't blame their standards of journalism, since that implies they ever had writers worth a damn.