Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
For at least 15 of those 30 years, it read more like Computer Shopper, anyway. I mourned it a long time ago.
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.
Agreed, even if it wasn't full of ads, printing a paper magazine to discuss multimedia machines that could better display the content is insane.
Paper computer magazines haven't made any sense for quite a while now.
Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category...
Tick-tock, TIME, tick-tock...
Dark Reflection
Im not so sure that PC enthusiasts are down, I just think there is a larger audience of PC users today then when it was still a hobby and therefore it seems small. at one point we were the big fish in a small pond, now we are the small fish in a big pond
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I loved it for the game demo cds that came with it.
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
Preach Mrs AC, boy was that the damned truth! My ex gave me a subscription to the thing a few years back and the first thing I had to do when an issue came in was open it over a trash bin to catch all the damned inserts that would fall out, and it seemed like every article was spread halfway across the mag because what would take 2 paragraphs on a webpage would take 4 pages thanks to all the ads they had jammed into each and every page!
Needless to say when that year was up no matter how many emails they sent begging for me to renew I didn't, at least on the Web I can control the ads and refuse to go to pages where they take 2 paragraphs and spread it out to 4 pages, with PCW they just crammed the living hell out of the thing. I bet if one were to take one of their last issues, cut out all the ads and just print the actual stories? damned thing probably wouldn't be 14 pages long, the rest was just crap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Gotta love that new magazine trend: "continued on page 82" and there aren't any page numbers. Whoever came up with that is an Evil Genius.
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.