“I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.”
– George Carlin

Indeed. Nothing changes. And everything changes. Once upon a time, I took three hours out of an evening at COMDEX to go watch George Carlin perform on stage. It was the funniest show I’ve ever seen in my life. The wisdom and humor of Carlin lives on, but on June 22nd the man himself passed away. Carlin was a man with so much to give the world that one medium couldn’t contain him. His nearly 50-year career spanned from stage to TV to audiobook to even mass-circulated email. OK, not the emails. Those were all falsely attributed.

We all have our own wisdom to share in our own ways. The trick lies in adapting your delivery to the times. Today, the only people who write in antiquated English like Shakespeare are either 10th graders studying sonnets for their beauty or those trying to parody Shakespeare for profit. Today, the style of 1920s silent films are generally only copied for quaint effect in TV commercials, but occasionally you run into something like Pixar’s latest flick, WALL-E, which manages its first half-hour or so without a shred of dialog and so harkens back to the genius that made silent films so powerful. Everything changes. And nothing changes.

We at RAM started this magazine almost seven years ago. Most of the core people involved had substantial backgrounds in the reseller channel—more than enough to recognize that the top periodicals in the industry did some things well and some not so well. For starters, they were as boring as watching Jell-O solidify and had just about as much complexity. It was just news, just one point, just a long-range glimpse at this one product. I mean, that’s fine to a point. When I Google “George Carlin death date,” all I want to know is June 22nd 2008. When I want to know what he said, who he was, and what lasting effect he had on the world—in short, when I want understanding—I go elsewhere.

Seven years ago, this industry needed a magazine with perspective and expertise that could provide understanding about the things that resellers needed. When you want to know what new GPU is for sale, you can go to Newegg. When you want to know why that GPU is important, what tools the vendors are providing to make it more profitable, and how to best convert that product into a sales opportunity, you come to us.

But it’s not just the text; it’s also the tone. Reseller Advocate has always prided itself on presentation. I like to think we look better and read more easily than other channel periodicals. It’s too easy to be boring. As Carlin proves, we don’t get to stick around forever, so it falls to each of us to make our time memorable and worthwhile. Is it such a sin to bring laughter into the professional world, to loosen one’s tie and act a bit more plebian? If a more liberal, lively presentation can make a subject more accessible and thus more comprehensible, isn’t that a good thing? I think so. And hey, you’re still with me here at the end of issue 81, so I assume we did something right.
The message doesn’t change, but the medium and times do. Seven years ago, we were in a recession, but a wholly different one. Seven years ago, gas prices were about $1.30 a gallon. Interestingly, the cost to mail a letter has risen only about 23%, from 34 cents to 42 cents. Meanwhile, I doubt the U.S. Postal Service has slashed its labor and maintenance costs, which means we’re about to have either a massive hike in postage costs or...I don’t know...maybe we’ll have to go back to the Pony Express. Oh, wait. Corn prices are up 400% in the last seven years, so forget that idea.

Some costs stay the same; some go up. The cost of psychotherapy has stayed about the same throughout this decade while the cost of printing a magazine has skyrocketed. Try printing one and you’ll discover both facts for yourself.

No doubt, because costs have gone up, print ad prices have generally gone up while viewer eyeballs have increasingly migrated from print to Web over the decade. Companies don’t want to advertise in print magazines anymore, sad but true. If you need proof, witness the death of Ziff Davis as we knew it. On March 6th of this year, ZD filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, toting roughly $500 million in debt obligations. Sections 9 through 11 of the filing contain some interesting tidbits:

“The Debtors experienced declining advertising revenues and were forced to discontinue publishing a number of magazines. The Debtors’ print advertising revenues decreased from $215 million in 2001 to $40 million in 2007. . . . As a result of declining advertising and subscription revenues, the Debtors experienced a decline in total annual revenues from approximately $300 million in 2001 to approximately $76 million in 2007. . . . As the Internet became a more widely utilized information medium, many of the Debtors’ print magazine subscribers began to move away from print, and towards Internet, publications to obtain their technology and videogame purchasing information. The Debtors’ highly leveraged capital structure prevented them from developing sufficient Internet publications in a timely manner to satisfy their subscribers’ demands.”

Draw your own conclusions. We sure did. It might be this issue, perhaps the next, or even maybe the one after that, but pretty quick here RAM the print magazine will be no more. Everything has changed. And yet, in a way, nothing is changing.

Seven years ago, there were plenty of channel magazines, and they all looked and felt about the same—professional and drab, efficient in covering the news but lacking in insight and interest. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but as I sit here typing this, I’m surfing to CRN’s site, ChannelWeb, and I see an article titled “AMD Prowls For Notebook Wins With Puma.” The article follows first-year journalism protocol: who, what, where, when, and how. I’m not saying this is good, bad, or indifferent. (OK, I actually think it’s indifferent.) You learn that Puma comprises the M780G chipset and Turion X2 CPU, and it supports a short list of key features, and you’ll be seeing it from several of the big notebook brands. No mention of how Puma compares against Montevina. No mention of custom-built notebooks. No sense of where Puma fits into today’s market or why it matters. The article is a little pile of factoids. Facts without meaning are like PC components. Until you put them together into something coherent and effective, you have a pile of stuff, not a computer.

SILENT BUT GOLDEN The original silent movies had to tell their stories through things like body language, camera angles, visual texture, and shadow. The visual medium is capable of wonderful things and can be an excellent learning vehicle...if the content developer has a clue how to leverage it.

And that’s another thing. Several of ushere are geeks who love the experience of grabbing a screwdriver and getting under a computer’s hood. I can give you a better understanding of a something if I can convey to you more fully the experience of working with it. For example, if we would have had a 790GX platform to test in house (they weren’t available before press time), we would have done that whole Advanced Clock Calibration deal in this month’s From the Labs column and told you not only where the voltages had to be set but what frequencies we subsequently hit and what temperatures it generated. That information is a lot more valuable than knowing how many OEM wins Puma scored. With such data, you can better plan for tech support as well as discover related upsell opportunities, such as premium heatsinks. Today, if you want this kind of information, you have to go to the enthusiast hardware sites, but those guys generally don’t care about system builders. We move in two different worlds.

Now for some hard honesty. If you read RAM, you know I love writing. I love the potential for poetry within the English language. I love stringing together words and thoughts that add up to something greater than their constituent parts. But I also acknowledge that this is 2008, not 1908. I despised the way Charles Dickens could stretch out a sentence for three-quarters of a page even when I was high school. Again, life is short; get to the damned point already, Chuck. Yet here I am, cranking out 6,000- to 8,000-word cover stories that may be increasingly anachronistic in an era of mobile browser-based readership. We’re a multimedia society with increasing intolerance for text-only content.

But I digress. I grudgingly but freely admit that if I had to learn about Puma from a text article or a good video, all other things being the same, I’d pick the video. (For that matter, if I have two hours to sit on the couch with my wife at night, we’ll almost always watch a movie rather than read books. So much for throwing stones.) For the kind of complex material we cover in RAM, video trumps text. I don’t mean the kind of slipshod video you see so much of on the Web, with some intolerably monotonous guy opening up a 1U server, showing you a long-distance flash of its motherboard, and saying, “This is a solid product.” Who’s that supposed to help? No, you want to get inside the chassis, see how stuff goes together, learn the smart ways to build, market, and support the thing. You need understanding, not a fact pile ported to pixels. We’re back to 2001, when the channel had its pick of content sources, and they all had the same fundamental problems.

So we’re doing the same thing at RAM now that we did back then. We’re ditching print and embracing video. Perhaps you’ve seen us hint at this before, but now it’s official. Video and online content are going to be our business, not our sideline. If you go to www.reselleradvocate.com and click into the RAM TV section, you’ll see what we’ve been doing. It’s all the same idea—deep dives into topics and technologies that are important to VARs and system builders—only now the treatments are shorter, sharper, and far more visually engaging so that you can learn from the material more effectively.

If you like RAM but you’re not on the RAM emailing list, please make sure to drop by our site and sign up. Because the reasons you’re here right now, reading this, aren’t changing. Our mission hasn’t changed in seven years. But the world has moved on, and it’s time to adapt. Please join us online for RAM’s next stage.

“Always do whatever’s next.”
– George Carlin