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Ziff Davis Teeters
Longtime Reader writes: "It is a short article with links all over the place, but Linux and Main is running a story that says Ziff Davis might file for bankruptcy this week. The company plans to stay in business by expanding its focus on computer games, the story says." To get you started, reader idiotnot contributes this link to coverage in the NYT.
I hate to see people loose their jobs, but zdnet and pcmag have been useless for over 5 years now. PCMag in particular stop reporting back in 95 and only rehashed PR junk. It is time for new crop of magazines to take the place of all the dead weight in the tech reporting industry. Zd used to have solid in depth articles that were fairly objective. But soon after win95 came out, that all changed. Of course these are my own biased opinions, but I know other techies share similar perspectives.
Microsoft suddenly decided to cut their advertising budget by 70%.
I clearly remember ZD as one of the pioneers of misleading mail-order campaigns. They sent a renewal notice that was designed to look like an IRS notice. That was over 10 years ago, and I immediately cancelled the remainder of my PC Magazine subscription, and have avoided dealing with them ever since. As they took over other magazines that I subscribed to, I let those subscriptions lapse. That was partially because I disliked ZD's behavior, and partially because the computer magazines were gradually becoming a waste of time anyway.
I try to avoid dealing with companies that use unethical advertising. Latest example that comes to mind is VeriSign.
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Sorting through the NY Times Article here were some interesting tid-bits I picked up.
* Willis Stein & Partners paid $780 million for the company during the bull market.
* The company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization are projected to be $6.5 million in 2002
Translation: At the current rate of profit, it will take over a hundred years to make up the initial investment. Ouch.
* (Earnings) are expected to rise to $34.4 million in 2003 if the restructuring goes as planned.
* Savings will be gained from the closing of money-losing magazines and the layoff of 700 of the company's 1,150 employees the last year.
Translation: We plan on making close to six times as much money as we were before, primarily by firing over 70% of our workforce, cutting our costs drastically.
Now, here's what bothers me to some extent, and by no means do you have to agree with me on this issue. But according to those numbers, this company is profitable. Granted, its not profitable enough to justify the high price it was bought back in April of 2000, but its in the positive, and appears to be staying there for awhile. However, it seems that being profitable isn't good enough these days. Not only does a company have to be profitable, but it doesn't appear to have any room to do anything that is 'extra-profitable', that is, things that are not done solely for profit.
For example, the article makes mention that the company in question had discontinued its Yahoo! Internet Life Magazina, which had a distribution of over a million. So clearly, some people liked the product. However, it wasn't discontinued due to declining interest, but rather because the number of ad pages had decreased by 50% over the past 2 years. My translation: "If you aren't in a good demographic, you don't get anything published for you."
That's not to say that ZD is under any obligation to operate at a loss for the benefit of the masses. My issue is that ZD is not operating at a loss, but they still plan on putting 700 people out of work, and discontinuing publications that have readership. If there ever was a place where the mythical 'invisible hand' of the market were giving lots of people the finger to enrich the few, this were it. After all, the only people who have to gain from this restructuring are the share holders, while hundreds of workers go unemployed and millions of readers lose their reading material.
So much for the market automatically doing what's best for everyone, eh?
For the love of god, hire some more women. How many women are on the gamespot.com staff? I'm looking at today's Gamespotting [gamespot.com], and it's all XY chromosomed folks. No wonder games like DOA Vollyball [gamespot.com] are coming out - there isn't someone to stop that jiggle fest from going out of control. (Not that I don't like good looking girls running round, but if they made it fair and featured guys in speedos, I wouldn't feel like it's being marketed only to 14 year old masturbating teenagers who don't have a like).
No booth babe pictures. Ever. Again. Look, maybe it's because I get laid on a regular basis, but I don't feel the need for computer gaming news to feature silicon injected flesh peddlers.
This guy's chick is *so* watching him post over his shoulder...
In the late 80s I actually read PC Magazine. I thought it was a half-decent way to keep abreast of things happening one particular platform -- "IBM PC Compatable" type machines. Of course, if you relied on it, you would end up with a very narrow and distorted view of Personal Computers.
In the early 90s, it seemed to get progressively worse. It kept its focus on only one hardware platform (which is almost, though not quite, justifiable today, but ten years ago, no way), but also focused almost exclusively on a single OS vendor -- you can guess who.
The last straw came in 1995 when they gave their "technical excellence" award for OSes, to Windows 95. Compared to some of the other things around at the time, such as OS/2 Warp, this was a complete joke. You can talk about market realities or whatever, but when it comes to pure technique, Windows 95 is to Warp, as a Model T is to a modern car.
Up to then, I knew I was getting distorted information from them, but just how distorted it was, I guess I just hadn't fully realized it. I took a look around at some other ZD publications then, just to make sure I wasn't jumping to any unjustified conclusions, and then safely concluded: ZD was just Microsoft's PR arm. They were not journalists.
I stopped reading anything published by Ziff-Davis. The words "Ziff-Davis" actually became a negative-value trademark, a badge for unusually poor quality. Worse than random noise. This is a company who can put goodwill on the liabilities side of their balance sheet.
They could even have reformed in the last few years, and I wouldn't know. They established a such horrible reputation and it would take a miracle to bring them back. I can't imagine that anyone reads them anymore.
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I stopped buying PC Rag after their ridiculous "comparison" of OS/2 and Win95. It was only two pages, with 80% covered by a single graphic, correctly stating the differences in how each OS protected its running apps. After showing clearly how OS/2 was superior in crash protection, they chose their winner: "Verdict: Windows95 by a mile." After the barrage of hate mail in the next issue's ed page, they responded that they chose Win95 because they knew it would win the bulk of the market share. Technical merit had nothing to do with it. They went with MS, against the facts they presented, because they knew MS would win anyway. That was the last straw for me. They deserve what they are getting now.