RE: Midrange Computing is liquidating.

It's interesting to hear this...   

I have to admit that I was a huge fan of MC when I first started reading
it 8-9 years ago.   I thought it was the best thing out there.   
I mean, it was THE BEST.

However, a few years ago it seemed to become SIGNIFICANTLY less useful.
Seemed like half of the articles were just "fluff".  I always wondered
why... 

We are a small shop.  I'm the manager, but I'm also a senior programmer.
Being a small shop, I'm able to do both.   However, I've always bought
these magazines (both MC and News/400) for their technical content.  

I never found any of the "managerial" articles useful.  It just seemed
like the author was spouting his opinions to the world.  As often as not,
I felt that the author was severely mislead about how the world worked...



On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Shannon O'Donnell wrote:

> Ron, and all, A few years ago, a decision was made at MC to include less
> code and figures in the magazine. There were many reasons for this. One
> of the most important, probably, in terms of dollars and cents, was that
> advertisers had complained for a long time that the magazine was becoming
> too much of a "nerds" journal (my words, not theirs, but that was the
> gist) and they were pulling their advertising dollars because of that. As
> you may or may not know, it's the advertising dollars that keep a
> magazine in business, not the subscriptions. So a decision was made to
> add more content for managers (who have the control over the bucks to
> spend on products advertised) and the like. The technical information was
> still very important to MC also, but they really wanted to get a better
> balance (i.e., about half techie stuff, half management stuff). This is
> why in a given issue you might have one article on "How to Succeed at
> Presentations" or whatever, and an article on "Java Fundamentals for
> AS/400 Programmers". One management-type piece versus one heavy
> technical, how-to, piece. I'm a programmer, first and foremost, and I've
> always liked the "how-to" articles best. Ted Holt is the same way, as
> were several of the other editors. But that doesn't mean that we couldnt'
> see the value in covering a wider range of topics. And we sure wouldn't
> have sold many magazines or sold much to adverstisers if all we wrote
> about was RPG Subfiles all the time! MC, like any other techical journal,
> needed to keep current. There was just soooo much information out there,
> and so little space each month to cover it in, that some things just had
> to go. That's why we didn't print an entire RPG program source, for
> example, if it didn't teach the reader anything new. Think about it:
> What's the point of including an "F-spec" in every program source in the
> magazine when 99.9% of the readers already know how to code an F-spec?
> It's more important, in the available space, to print the most important
> pieces of a code source. The rest, the reader can download from the web
> site (well...they USED! to be able to download it....) MC never lost
> sight of it's primary readership, the AS/400 programmers and
> administrators that were in the trenches putting out fires day after day.
> But at the same time, like any good business, they sought to increase
> readership (which, by the way, was at the hightest it'd ever been when
> IIR shut us down....figure that one out, if you can!) and thereby
> increase sales and profits. So it's not that we didn't see the advantage
> in printing an entire source member...it's just that there wasn't room to
> do that and cover everything else.


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