PCWorld Magazine Is No More

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Posted by timothy on Thursday July 11, 2013 @06:37AM from the long-rather-for-the-old-and-big-computer-shopper dept.

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."

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PC World - More Ads then the Internet! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-07-11 06:42 · Score: 4, Informative

Good riddance to it I say!
1. Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! by gl4ss · 2013-07-11 09:33 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  around here it was just not being outdated that killed them. some local magazines were first to go online and being up to date. like this one magazine I used to subscribe to.
  what killed them(for me and majority of subscribers) was that when computers went really mainstream in late '90s they went totally mainstream with their articles - this ended up in them having just shit for content. all they have now are some fluff reviews, nothing about how to do cool stuff and full page images. the same magazine that had 10 years earlier articles about c64 coding, assembly, basic, interfacing hw to computers, really soulful honest game reviews, detoriated to a magazine that had yearly printer reviews, yearly monitor reviews - and the text for those pieces could have been the same from year to year. somewhere along the line they even dipped the bottom of the barrel and started doing "full" game reviews based on fucking screenshots, in order to "compete" while in reality I or other readers wouldn't have cared shit if the games they reviewed were 6 months or even a year old as long as they reviewed them properly. they should have kept writing for the computer hobbyists, since the computer non-hobbyists aren't going to read their fucking magazine - offline OR online. the fuckers even changed the paper to some glossy variant that doesn't flame up easily so couldn't even light up the stove for the sauna with it if the issue was just bullshit...
  but non-hobbyists so called casual computer users are a bigger market so they tried to steer the magazine toward them... failing miserably along the way. and now that same fucking magazine wants me to pay 1 euro - I'm not kidding - for reading a single article online. FUCK EM.
  I mean, that magazine had the guts to do a game review this short back in the day: "shi**y clone of commando". on print - and apparently that was enough to say about the game and I believed the review, it seemed honest. now later they didn't dare to criticize any game that harshly, everything is at least "ok" and they spend paragraphs justifying how someone casual might like the game or just outright praising the game without seeing it play nor playing it.
  
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  world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Re:Sad, but no great loss... by NormAtHome · 2013-07-11 07:01 · Score: 3, Informative

For sure, but what did it for me was their reviews and how good competitive products never made it in to the group being reviewed and things that were highly rated took a beating on end user reviews.
Upgrading? by theurge14 · 2013-07-11 07:01 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
A Quibble by HiThere · 2013-07-11 07:07 · Score: 3, Informative

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).

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Not to be confused with Personal Computer World by turgid · 2013-07-11 07:15 · Score: 4, Informative

I ended my subscription to that back in the 90s when they chose to ignore anything non-Windows.
It used to have great reviews as well as technical articles and many pages of program listings in a wide variety of languages for many different platforms. There were tutorials on things like the maths behind 3D graphics and fractals, CPU architectures (there was once a superb one on the Motorola 68000 family), ARM assembly language (when the Archimedes was kicking the PeeCee's butt), you name it.
Then it turned into a Windows PeeCee shopping magazine with how-to-change-your-Windows-background-picture articles...

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Stick Men
Re:B'bye by JustOK · 2013-07-11 07:23 · Score: 4, Informative

Many cars have 5 tires.

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rewriting history since 2109
Re:Sad, but no great loss... by ShanghaiBill · 2013-07-11 07:35 · Score: 5, Informative

For sure, but what did it for me was their reviews and how good competitive products never made it in to the group being reviewed and things that were highly rated took a beating on end user reviews.
To be included in the comparison, and even to get high ratings, you had to buy ads in the magazine. I worked for a company that ran ads in PCWorld in the 1980s and 1990s. The ad salespeople would come right out and say that if you increased your ad budget, they would make sure you were "taken care of" in the reviews. So we increased our ad spending. We were more interested in being rich than ethical.