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Monday, February 17, 2003
Just How Scarce is News about Microsoft?
For the low, low price of $399 a year, you can subscribe to Microsoft-Watch, an e-mail newsletter produced by veteran ZDNet reporter Mary Jo Foley that purports to offer breaking news about the software titan before anyone else knows about it. Hmm, so I can pay 400 bucks a year for something I can get for free or much cheaper in hundreds of other online publications. Awesome!
The lead story on the site is a brief post referencing a Newsweek story about threedegrees, Microsoft's new software aimed at teens and social groups. Wow, talk about exclusive content!
To be fair, Foley's efforts seem respectable, and they do have informative, free content, too. But $399 seems like a high price to pay for information that is so widely covered ubiquitously by so many others. It seems like an odd publication for Ziff Davis, which gets most of its revenue from offline mags and online ads. Maybe they're testing the waters of charging subscriptions to online content, faced with declining offline profits?
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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