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Saturday, March 12, 2005

Guest Rant of the Week: Where Are All the Software Magazines?

GUEST RANT
By Will Highfield
I Googled "software magazines" and didn't find a single magazine devoted to thoroughly reviewing and explaining all the current software products in specific catagories, such as music notation, desktop publishing, database building, finance, accounting, CAD, you-name-it.

Years ago, Computer Shopper discussed CAD programs in detail, over a number of issues. Of course I enjoyed the heck out of it. What a shame it's gone. A dedicated software magazine could do a tremendous service for users. It opens the possibility of teaching how software is used to solve problems. It also leaves room to examine how ground-swell coding changes brings around wholesale changes in the way software is used to approach a problem. Applications could be compared to each other. To me, that's the place to advertise hardware - although not so much it crowds out the main
purpose of the mag.

A magazine like that would not be oriented around coders, but users. Personally, I love to hear how software solves a problem. I used to think databases were beyond me, but suddenly the light shone through - mostly from reading manuals and such. Of course, there could be coder-centric sections, kind of like PC Magazine used to have, in its better days. I think there would be a market for this magazine. Frankly, I'm bored with talking about the latest gadgets. -- Will

Agree? Disagree? Leave a Comment for Will.

# Permalink Posted at 12:42 PM 4 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

From spending a year and a half in my high school's CAD lab, I know there are at least a couple of CAD publications such as Cadalyst and Cadence. I never really read them, but I do remember seeing them in the lab.

# posted by David 1:00 PM

Software Today www.softwaretoday.com
Software Weekly www.softwareweek.com
Software Monthly www.softwaremothly.com

Seems like a good idea to me.

Now that I "switched" to Mac OS X, I only care about software.

,dave

# posted by Dave Barnes 8:44 PM

A lot of things happened to software coverage and software itself. Let's see if I can take a stab at an "answer": The biggest groupings of software that almost all people use -- spreadsheets, word processors, presentation -got gobbled up by Microsoft Office. You could do shoot-outs with Word Perfect and Word, but after a while, it just wasn't worth the investment in pages - people just used Office.

Then the Web thing happened and software took a back seat to online apps, like browsers and things you could do online. Microsoft again ate up the web market (although FireFox/Mozilla is taking some marketshare back w00t!) but most coverage was on what website was new and what you could do online (buy books, pay bills, book flights, etc.)

Today, there is an explosion of need for good software. I spend a lot of time working with video and a good video/DVD program is not easy to find. Same with music, photo, and video storage and retrieval: most people use what comes with their MP3 players, but a good jukebox and system for ripping, storing and even burning or copying your content to a device needs a lot of work. However, many great solutions are available online for free. (Like Picassa)

On the Mac - the software most raved about also ships free with a new system, so again, you can't really do comparisons since so many people are happy out of the box with what they got.

So speaking as a former magazine editor, I would say that it is hard and expensive to do in-dpeth software testing and writing because those categories are also pretty much infiltrated by Apple or Microsoft. There are great utilities and adds-on that do get coverage, but more like the 50-100 word write ups you see today and not enough to fund a software only magazine. That's why the biggest "software mags" are about games. THAT is where the action literally is right now.

# posted by Alice 11:45 AM

I think part of why you don't see anything like "Software Magazine" is that much software is targetted at verticals and thus reviews are best done by publications working within those verticals. The days of horizontal applications being interesting are long gone, with most of those markets having been devoured by a few massive companies as Alice points out.

We do see software reviews and comparisons a lot in vertically targetted magazines -- for instance, the last two issues of Digital Photo Pro magazine contained reasonably in-depth reviews of a series of RAW image format processor applications.

In some sense I think this is illustrative of how important and ingrained software has become in many industries.

# posted by Jim Frost 12:22 PM

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