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 ShanghaiBill · 2013-07-11 07:10 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Good riddance to it I say!
  Ah, but in the early days, the ads were the best part. I rarely even bothered to read the articles. When each issue arrived, I would open it up to the cheap yellow "tombstone" ads near the back. You could run an ad there for $100/month. There was always some fascinating new gizmo that some guy was making in his garage and advertising there. After a month or two, most of the products disappeared, but some of them grew into successful startups. Reading those ads was like watching the history of technology unfold.
2. Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! by ma1wrbu5tr · 2013-07-11 08:12 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I remember getting 3.5" floppies loaded with great stuff. Amazing to me that there was so much fun to be had on 1.44MBs. I loved the Doom shareware demo and it led to a sale of the full game. The "economics of FREE" in action.
  
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  Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
3. Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! by HaZardman27 · 2013-07-11 08:25 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Or they could be browsing the internet on a PC. They could even buy a cheap tablet with wifi access to carry into their bathroom so they could read from more useful resources than an ad-filled magazine even while they relieve themselves. The reason that PC magazines died off is because they are an absolutely outdated medium, not because the people who would read them are now hipsters.
  
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  Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
4. Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-07-11 08:35 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Completely agree - I fondly remember picking up Computer Shopper to see what the best deals were for buying cheap memory, hard drives, etc. Zines like Byte and PCWorld were ok for general purpose reading, but Dr Dobbs was one of my favs for programming. Along with 2600 and Phrack for stuff on the fringes.
  Thanks for the memories - I hate to say it, but today's tech is nowhere as exciting as those wild-west days were. I feel privileged to have been part of that.
  Now get off my lawn!
5. 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.
No worries by Spy+Handler · 2013-07-11 06:42 · Score: 4, Funny

PCWorld can just rename itself MobileWorld or CloudWorld or SocialWorld and it will be thriving again!
1. Re:No worries by the+agent+man · 2013-07-11 06:56 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  or how about "Post-PCWorld" ?
2. Re:No worries by operagost · 2013-07-11 07:00 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I'd go with LinuxDesktopWorld myself. I hear next year will be the year it finally takes off!
  
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  Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Figures by Mr.+Freeman · 2013-07-11 06:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

You can only ramble on about going paperless in print articles for so long before you start to look a little silly.

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-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Sad, but no great loss... by geminidomino · 2013-07-11 06:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

For at least 15 of those 30 years, it read more like Computer Shopper, anyway. I mourned it a long time ago.
1. 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.
2. Re:Sad, but no great loss... by PRMan · 2013-07-11 08:22 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I remember in the early days when they weren't "bought" like PCMag. But eventually they succumbed. I distinctly recall the day when the worst version of Norton in history won when it slowed your PC down by half the moment you installed it. It was accompanied by Norton ads all over the magazine (back cover, centerfold, inside front cover). I knew then that it was bought for sure.
  
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  Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
3. Re:Sad, but no great loss... by Lord+Apathy · 2013-07-11 09:06 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I loved computer shopper. Not the souless glossy pamphlet that it became. The real computer shopper was 300+ pages of nothing but ads all printed on cheap pulp paper, heavy enough to make phone books jealous and mailmen cry.
  It was a cheap source of paper and weight when in need, like when you are sitting on the toilet and notice your short of a vital component. Got a computer shopper, your covered. Need something to hold your ass down when a hurricane winds a blowing, your covered. Got a body to sink and got no cement, your covered.
  Damn I miss that book, but I'm sure glad my ex wife missed when she threw one at me.
  
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  Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Good riddance by Anonymous Coward · 2013-07-11 06:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Just Gotta Say It by jasnw · 2013-07-11 06:55 · Score: 5, Funny

This really BYTEs.
1. Re:Just Gotta Say It by JustOK · 2013-07-11 07:22 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Like that joke hasn't been made 2600 times before
  
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  rewriting history since 2109
B'bye by ubergeek65536 · 2013-07-11 06:58 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
1. 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
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.
1. Re:Upgrading? by ganjadude · 2013-07-11 07:23 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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
  
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  have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Advertising by twoears · 2013-07-11 07:12 · Score: 5, Funny

So where are Compuserve and AOL going to get all their customers?
Next up : TIME? by OakDragon · 2013-07-11 07:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category...
Tick-tock, TIME, tick-tock...

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Dark Reflection
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
end of second era by fermion · 2013-07-11 07:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black