Sometimes you've been
doing something so long that you forget there was ever a reason in the first
place which set up this pattern of behavior. Like remembering to breathe, it's
something which you do automatically. If someone asks you about it the first
reaction can be mild panic. Gosh do I really do this automatically? - Even in my
sleep?
It occurred to me that my company,
ACSL, must be one
of the only computer publications which has never accepted or run an ad for a
PC. That "never" runs to more than 11 years of publishing, of which
the last 7 have been on the web. Zero. Zilch. Not even once.
It's not
that we've never been asked. It's just that we always say "no".
It's
not that we've got anything against desktop computing. For many years, while
there was a market for that type of thing we ran ads for
Sun workstations
and compatibles. Then when Sun finally killed off the last of the viable SPARC
clones, there wasn't much of a market left for SPARC workstations, so no need to
advertise them. We're not against notebooks either. That's been a very healthy
market for the last few years. It's just that we only run ads for
SPARC notebooks.
That bias against PCs was natural for the first 7 years of publishing, during
which our only publication was the
SPARC Product Directory.
But then in 1998 we opened the door to a much bigger market when we started
STORAGEsearch.com
Still no
PC ads. But now I had a better reason for not running them.
I had come
to the conclusion that it was simply a bad idea for IT publications to ever run
ads which weren't directly related to the editorial content in their
publications. If you go to a computer web site and see a lot of space on your
screen taken up by ads for books and credit cards - is it really a computer
site? You shouldn't have to filter out the ads to find what you want. The ads
should be just as important to you as the news stories. Otherwise the publisher
isn't doing a good service for their readers. So our storage site has never run
ads for any products or services which weren't directly related to storage.
Don't PCs connect to storage? Well maybe they do - but only by some sort of
cable. We do run ads for SCSI
cables, and we also run ads for
memory expansion but that's
as close as we've ever got to the PC itself.
So - shocking as this
voyage of self discovery has been - the reasons may have changed - but it's
still the right thing for us not to do. We don't run ads for PCs. | |
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