The world lost a great man yesterday. Om Malik’s family posted that he passed away on June 24, 2026. We lost a master at connecting the dots, seeing the patterns – and then telling the stories. He was only 59 (1 year older than me!).

[Update: John Gruber published a beautiful reflection that included the info that Om had been in the hospital since mid-April dealing with issues associated with his heart.]

This blog, Disruptive Telephony, owes its existence to Om and the pack of others that were active back in the early and mid-2000s. This whole “blogging” thing was new. And “voice-over-IP”, a.k.a. “VoIP” was new. Skype was disrupting telephony and blogging was disrupting online publishing. As I wrote back in 2016 celebrating 10 years of writing on this site:

In 2006, the “VoIP blogging” world was quite small – and we all pretty much knew other. Om Malik was writing on his own site (it was yet to become GigaOm). Andy Abramson had VoIPWatch. Jeff Pulver was writing on his sites. Tom Keating at his “VoIP and Gadgets blog” on TMC. Martin Geddes had his “Telepocalypse” site. Alec Saunders had “Saunderslog”. And there were a…