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PCWorld Magazine Is No More
harrymcc writes "After slightly more than 30 years, PCWorld — one of the most successful computer magazines of all time — is discontinuing print publication. It was the last general-interest magazine for PC users, so it really is the end of an era. Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category, in part as a former editor at PCWorld, but mostly as a guy who really, really loved to read computer magazines."
Good riddance to it I say!
PCWorld can just rename itself MobileWorld or CloudWorld or SocialWorld and it will be thriving again!
So long as PC World continues to publish content on their site or maybe even start publishing via Google Play, this is not the end of the magazine. It has merely shifted formats.
You can only ramble on about going paperless in print articles for so long before you start to look a little silly.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
PC World?
I haven't seen them on the magazine rack for over ten years. I didn't even know they were still in business.
I don't know how much time I've spent correcting people on things they read in that worthless joke of a magazine but it's been one of the largest sources of misinformation in the industry I've ever seen, almost as bad as that blog Rob Malda used to run.
I know that given the rise in electronic media, this is pretty much an inevitability for print magazines, but it's still pretty shocking. PCWorld was one of my favorite tech magazines. I guess the problem was that I'd only read it while I was perusing the drug store, or if I felt like splurging on an occasional copy. Magazine subscriptions are a totally unnecessary expense for most folks now.
For at least 15 of those 30 years, it read more like Computer Shopper, anyway. I mourned it a long time ago.
Not to be confused with Personal Computer World, or PCW. The earliest and best UK computer magazine, that already died in 2009.
Computer magazines are not dead. Computer != PC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_magazines
Over the last 30 years, its editors got in bed with whatever comapny was big at the time and therefore apid the most for ad space (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, etc.)
So much for unbiased journalism. PC World, aong with PC Mag, epitomized an era where ad dollars literally bought favorable reviews.
What EA, Ubi, Activision and others did to printed gaming mags was peanuts in comparison.
This really BYTEs.
I can't say I'm sorry to see it go. It was like reading a car magazine that explains that cars have four tires in every article.
Suddenly millions of people cried out at once when they realized they haven't used a PC expansion slot in over 5 years.
The "PC enthusiast" scene has been quietly dying for years.
It is mischaracterized as "the last general-interest magazine", as at least when I last read it, over a decade ago now, it was quite MSWind centric. It didn't even cover Apple.
Admittedly, i didn't make a large sample at that time, but that was merely to confirm that it hadn't change. Byte and Dr. Dobbs were much more general interest (though Dr. Dobbs was a bit technical for that description).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How long would you expect a computer enthusiast to use anything but a computer to consume media?
So where are Compuserve and AOL going to get all their customers?
Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category...
Tick-tock, TIME, tick-tock...
Dark Reflection
I react to this news in much the same fashion I will presumably someday react to the passing of Abe Vigoda.
There are very few topics which justify scheduled print at this point. It's important, for example, to have print newspapers so kidnappers can confirm in photograph that their hostage is alive today and not a fortnight ago.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I miss the days of the C++ Journal, or Dr. Dobbs, which had high quality articles. Sure, you can get them online, but I like to look at something that isn't a computer screen occasionally. Magazines are a nice break from an LCD screen that sits at the same depth from me all day.
The first era of the PC ended with Byte. This was when people actually put computers together, actually understood what the computer was doing, and wasn't obsessed with memory and clock speed unless it actually improved performance. Then, over the past 20 years it simply became what MS Windows machine to buy and how expensive MS Office is. So PC World ending might signal a world in which we are trying to innovative things with computers again, albeit in a much more restrictive environment.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I used to work for MaximumPC magazine (I wrote Linux columns on their website a few years ago) and I saw the writing on the wall even then. Dead-tree magazines (especially tech-related) have been on their last legs for awile now.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
The only magazines I subscribe to are Maxim and Popular Mechanics. I do not intend on renewing my Popular Mechanics because it is filled with ads, in fact there are at least 3 pages of adds and crap for every page with something good to read about.
And you know what? TV is becoming the same way. Sometimes I time how long commercial breaks are, and it regularly gets into the 5-7 minute area.. Its downright annoying.
Is that you, Alistair ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Kilobaud Microcomputing (later Microcomputing)
Creative Computing
Compute!
Byte
Dr. Dobbs
A+
InCider
C.A.L.L. Apple
GS-Plus
Softline
Softside
Softalk
Computer Shopper
Hardcore (later Core)
Micro (The 6502 Journal)
Assembly Lines
DEC Professional
VAX Professional
Maximum Linux
Linux Journal
All computer magazines I subscribed to or purchased regularly, and I think all but a few are long dead
Sadly I still have most of them gathering dust in storage; I really need to do something about that...
never got into windows so never got into single platform MS specific mags.
I had a subscription to PC World for a few years in the mid '90s. It was a pretty good mag back then, although even then I could detect a bias towards corporate purchasing types in at least some of the content. As time went on it had less content and more ads. My mother bought me a couple issues fiveish years ago and there wasn't much left of what I remembered. It'd gotten dumbed-down quite a bit, but that probably has something to do with the democratization of computing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The death of BYTE magazine and Creative Computing Magazines hit me HARD. I subscribed to them in high school after I spent $3,000 on a Apple II with 32k RAM. I could not comprehend how such amazing magazines could die. I can't even raise a brow at any magazine that vanishes now, especially when the world of Internet information is at hand.
A moment of silence for boot, the last computer magazine to matter.
PCWorld magazine is dead.
It will still continue in digital, so, now, instead of taking your PCWorld mag to the bathroom, you'll be taking your tablet! :)
I was always too poor to afford any of the things written about in PCWorld or PCMag, but I had subscriptions that became sort of like the big wish book of old, where I dreamed of one day owning a Coleco Adam or Ti994A.
At that time, I actually had no computer at all. One of my friends got a complete Gateway 486DX2-66 system with a laser printer back when that sort of kit cost $5000. She would print stuff off usenet and use reams of paper just because she could. That her parents could drop 5G on a computer firmly cemented both of us on two entirely different societal levels. Or at least so it seemed for a while. I mean, everything my family owned at that time probably wasn't worth the cost of that setup,
Years later, I have too many computers laying around and nobody cares any more who has the fastest one. And nobody prints much of anything. Shrug.
The place where I worked recently junked a huge pile of old PCs. One of them was an ancient Gateway PC labeled simply as "Gateway Tower" on the brand plate. It was in fact the very same sort of 486DX2-66 that my friend had. Gateway didn't even have model numbers back then.
It junked along with much more current gear. Nobody cared.
Sig for hire.
I used to work for a competitor of theirs (Windows Magazine), but I'm sad to see them go. Not PC World in general, but the "computer magazine" market in particular seems to have slid downhill a lot. As for the PC World staff goes, I sympathize a lot. I actually went through 2 shut downs with Windows Magazine. The first when we were called in by marketing, told we had a "great product but they didn't know how to sell it" so they were shutting us down. We went web-only and I remained on to work on their website. The second when a last-minute company-wide phone conference was called (never a good sign) and we were told that they were moving away from making their own content and would just rebrand others' content.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
People who buy computer magazine probably own a computer.
If you're geeky enough to buy a magazine you;re geeky enough to Google what ever is printed in that magazine.
WINDOWS MAGAZINE, 1997, "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue page 210, #1/first entry in fact (my work is there)
WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 - page 92, insert section, MUST HAVE WARES, my work is again, there
* :)
(My work appeared in your former place of employ's pages RIGHT around the time you worked there, in those "halcyon days of yore"!)
APK
P.S.=> PCWorld too, albeit, afaik - the German edition of that publication:
PC-WELT FEB 1998 - page 84, again, my work is featured there
Now it seems that the "printed page" has gone by the wayside in lieu of online content largely instead - Oh "The Times, they are a changin'"...
... apk
...nothing of value was lost