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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."
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.
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.
I'd go with LinuxDesktopWorld myself. I hear next year will be the year it finally takes off!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
So where are Compuserve and AOL going to get all their customers?
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.
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!
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.