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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!
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.
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.
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 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...
Stick Men
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
Ain't that the truth. The glory days were certainly the early 80s, when all varied home computers were being released. I treasured the copies with the first reviews of the ZX80, ZX81 and the BBC Micro and so on. Very sad when I had to part with them.
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.
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.