Windows Magazine

» see winmag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

windows magazine died twice and only the first death got a goodbye. the print edition stopped in august 1999 with farewell columns and a staff of forty-five looking for the next thing. the website ran on for nineteen more months and then went off without a word from anyone.

james e. fawcette started it in 1990, the year windows 3.0 shipped and the first year it made sense to publish a monthly about a graphical shell rather than about dos. cmp media bought it in 1991 and relaunched it in 1992. by the end of the decade fred davis and then mike elgan had run it into a paid circulation of eight hundred thousand, which put it near the top of the american computer newsstand.

what killed it was not readers. in june 1999 united news and media bought cmp for nine hundred and twenty million dollars, and two months later the last printed issue went out. karen kenworthy, who had written for the magazine for nine years, described it afterward as a victim of too many acquisitions: small independent publisher, then a bigger one, then a bigger one still, and then a consolidation memo.

i was online from 1998 on a modem at home in turkey, which put me on the wrong side of this magazine in two directions at once. a us monthly was never going to be something i held. and the thing that replaced it for me, turkish forums like donanimhaber and frmtr where you posted your hardware list in your signature and somebody with the same motherboard answered you that evening, is the same thing that was quietly replacing it for the readers it did have.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the pitch was narrow on purpose. other magazines covered computers while this one covered an operating system, and for about eight years that was a category getting bigger rather than smaller. every business that moved off dos needed somebody to explain the new thing, and eight hundred thousand people a month were willing to pay for that explanation on paper.

the november 1995 cover promises two thousand tips and calls itself the number one resource for windows information. that is a magazine with no doubt about its position, printed a few months after windows 95 launched, at what turned out to be about the top.

~ the postmortem ~

winmag.com went up in july 1999, one month before the print edition folded, which reads less like a strategy than like a lifeboat. it worked, in the sense that traffic came. it did not work in the sense that mattered: roughly a million clicks a month against an ad market that in 1999 and 2000 did not know what to pay for them, inside a company that had just been bought and was looking for things to consolidate.

on 19 march 2001 the site was shut. the last issue number on record is one hundred. english wikipedia still files the magazine under 2002 disestablishments while its own body text says 2001, which is a small thing but tells you how little attention the second death got.

~ the long tail ~

winmag.com still answers. it sends you to informationweek.com/windows, which carries nothing that was ever on winmag.com. the archive lives on archive.org instead, a handful of scanned mid-nineties issues where the ads take up more pages than the articles and every one of them is for a company that also no longer exists.

the columnists mostly outlasted the publisher. kenworthy kept shipping her free windows utilities off her own site for years after the masthead she wrote under stopped existing, which is roughly what happened to the whole trade press: the writers survived, the mastheads did not.

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