Posts Tagged ‘online’

Print is Dead by topgold

I love magazines. I love the look and the feel. I know that in most cases I can find the same information online, but the experience is not the same.

With that said, let me also say that I stopped reading magazines for a while. The price kept getting higher for less and less information. Instead of more content the ads were taking over.

This is a result of a cycle. Less people read the mags and revenue falls–so the mags increase the advertising which brings in less revenue from individual ads as the readership lowers–so the magazine sells more ads with less content until the end finally comes and the magazine goes under. How is that for a run-on sentence?

At times, especially now with the economy so uncertain, it seems like this is an unbreakable cycle. Blogs and news sites run stories about the troubles of the print media. People like Rupert Murdoch talk about the shift and suggest charging for online content that was once free. It is the start of a whole new cycle.

Well, I have an idea, and it involves everyone’s favorite price point, free. I put forth that the new paradigm of print is free. For free, people will accept more ads and less content. For free, more people will subscribe to magazines previously abandoned. More eyeballs means that the mags can charge a higher premium for the advertising content. A whole new cycle breaks the old.

Now, before you bolt from this blog calling me an idiot, let me give you some background on how I came up with this idea. It comes from the most frugal person I know, my better half, Effie.

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The title is serious. 

Why is it that we in the tech world are so willing to accept products and services that don’t work? Services that are in perpetual beta, that launch with caveats that it really doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do yet, but it’s going to be great one day.  Products are the same thing, we get  product launches supposed to change our life but the products don’t necessarily do what the descriptions promise.

It’s a bit strange, because in most areas of our lives, we only accept the best.  We only accept the things that work properly.  But in the tech world, we make constant excuses for things that do not work correctly.

We even embrace things like Twitter, a prime example of services with problems. From the first day it seemed to have scaling problems.  And the “Fail Whale” is known by people that do not even use the service.

The fact is, I use and need these products and services as much as the next guy.  So many people are enamored with what is coming out of Silicon Valley right now, and I guess that is the geek culture.  They, and by they I mean I, just except second-best and barely usable.  There’s not much we can do about it.  If you want to play the game and hang with the “in” crowd, You have to use what is available.

So I guess I wrote this post without an answer to the problem that I pose.  And I guess that makes this kind of redundant, but I decided it is relevant. Every service and damn near every gadget I bought or have used since the beginning of this year has had flaws. Some serious, some just aggravating.  But it’s still the best we have available. 

Maybe the answer is to stop rushing things to market. Stop going for whiz-bang effects and settle for, “it works.”

But, I have been around this long enough to know that will not be the case anytime soon.

I need to go to Think Geek and get some more gear to numb the pain.

Cheers,
Eban