AllThingsD

» see allthingsd.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i knew the d conference clips before i knew the blog. the steve jobs and bill gates joint interview from may '07 was a youtube link you would forward to someone in 2009 if you wanted to make a point about the personal computer era. the two of them on red chairs, walt mossberg and kara swisher in the middle, no slides, no script. that clip was the part of allthingsd that crossed the language barrier into the english-speaking tech-watching part of my life in turkey. the daily blog was upstream of the clip but downstream of my actual reading habits at the time.

allthingsd was launched on april 16 '07 as a dow jones property, the wall street journal's tech blog under the d conference brand mossberg and swisher had been running since 2003. the d conference (full name all things digital) had been an annual invite-only event in carlsbad california with one rule, the interview was always live without a deck.

mossberg had been the wsj personal technology columnist since 1991. swisher had joined the wsj in 1997 covering the internet beat. the pair ran the conference for six years before launching the daily site as the year-round version of the same editorial style.

the format on the site was straight. short news items written by swisher and mossberg and a small staff (peter kafka, ina fried, liz gannes were the bylines that showed up most often) plus recaps of the d conference interviews. there was also a small enterprise-tech sub-blog called allthingsdigital cio that ran on the same template. the page design was a centered column on a white background with a small allthingsd wordmark in the upper left. there was no flash, no auto-playing video. it was a wsj-quality text site in 2007 when most tech blogs were a sidebar of widgets.

the september 2013 split was the formal end. dow jones decided not to renew the agreement with swisher and mossberg, the announcement on september 19 '13 was that mossberg would leave the wsj at year end. the allthingsd brand was owned by dow jones, the editorial team behind it was not. the site shut down on december 31 '13 and the recode site launched on january 2 '14 with the same writers on a new url.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the d conference ~

this part i was not around for. the conference was the thing. invite-only, around four hundred attendees, the four seasons aviara in carlsbad through most of the run. each day was structured around two or three onstage interviews of about an hour. no prepared remarks, no slide deck. mossberg and swisher would alternate questions across a single guest or a small panel.

the canonical interview was d5 in may '07 with steve jobs and bill gates onstage at the same time. the two of them had not done a joint long-form interview before, the conversation ran about ninety minutes and covered the apple-microsoft history from the late seventies through the iphone announcement that had just happened in january. the clip went on youtube the next week and has been there ever since. d8 in 2010 had steve jobs again, the year after the iphone 4 antenna issue. the format kept getting jobs to admit things on stage that apple pr would not have approved in a written interview.

~ the dow jones split ~

anyway, the corporate arrangement was always a license rather than an acquisition. dow jones owned the allthingsd trademark and the d conference brand, mossberg and swisher and their team were employees of the wsj. in those days. the contract was a five-year renewal that ran out in '13. the negotiation through the summer of that year was about renewing the license under news corp's post-2007 ownership. it did not close.

the announcement on september 19 '13 came in two pieces. mossberg would retire from the wsj at the end of the year. the allthingsd brand and the d conference would stay at dow jones but the editorial team would not. swisher and mossberg lost the right to use the names they had built the brand on. recode launched on january 2 '14 with the same writers, the same red chair format, a new url. nbcu came in as the funder. the d conference rebranded as wsjd live for one year under dow jones, then was quietly retired in '15.

~ the long tail ~

allthingsd.com still resolves in 2026 but it points at a wsj redirect, the original article archive sits behind various paywalls and link-rot issues. the kara swisher / walt mossberg interview format moved to recode and from there into vox media when recode was acquired in may '15. swisher later launched her own podcast on the box media side, mossberg retired from active reviewing in '17. neither of them runs a daily tech site any more.

the cultural mark allthingsd left was the format. the onstage interview with no slides became the standard for tech conference programming after d had been running it for a decade. code conference (vox), the new yorker tech week, the verge live events, every onstage tech-ceo interview in the past fifteen years owes part of its shape to the red chair pattern. the site itself is a footnote, the conference is what the format came from.

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