by Ethan Johnson
January 11, 2007

For all practical intents and purposes, TUX Magazine is no more:

For a number of reasons--not all financial--the model we had built for TUX was not sustainable. At this point, a group of us who were involved in TUX are tossing some ideas around. Where it will go we are not sure but let me assure you that enough of us feel TUX needs to exist that we will try our best to come up with, as they say, "Plan B".

I will keep an eye out for whatever form Plan B might take, but in short I will say that I feel some amount of vindication in my decision to fold Vision Monthly as quickly as I did. I saw down the road that my chosen operating model wasn't going to work, and unlike TUX I didn't serve up any advertising. Which means they had a somewhat steadier revenue model than I did, and still folded. It just took longer.

by Ethan Johnson
September 10, 2006

I was working on the first of a series of articles, when I lost myself in thoughts about the brute force nature of advertising. Simply put, advertising, especially in the realm of the Fortune 500 company, is intended to decimate your imagination, and therefore increase the likelihood exponentially that you will pay for their product or service.

by Ethan Johnson
June 26, 2006

Wow. If you ever thought that there was nothing lower than lists of "people who matter", Business 2.0 provides a list of people who don't.

Consider the case of Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux open-source operating system:

by Ethan Johnson
August 19, 2000

Will my subscription to Fast Company ever die? I've received numerous "death notices" (the last one I got sealed the deal for me to let my subscription lapse), but the proverbial beat goes on.

I told Mar recently that I liken Fast Company to the recording industry trade mag Mix, which I enjoyed once upon a time upon first reading, and eventually relegated to the ashbin of history. Only the difference is that Mix was guilty of basically writing ad copy for various equipment manufacturers and passing it off as "the latest recording industry news", whereas Fast Company basically relies on "new economy" flacks (and Tom Peters for good measure) to do most of the heavy lifting, which results in sidebar panels that read like a bloated resume that should be eyed warily by any HR denizen worth their salt. Is it good riddance yet?

Lest I should receive any flames for calling Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon.com) a "new economy" flack, howza 'bout reading a copy of Fast Company? Feeling any deep insight yet from the world's best and brightest up-and-comers? Or are you getting more out of a few strategically placed full-page advertisements?

Practicing what I'm preaching, I went to the heart of the action: the Fast Company web page, whereupon I found the following excerpt:

I recently spoke to a bunch of purchasing officers in New Orleans. I said, "If you're not ready to be enterprise- and industry-reinvention evangelists, then do yourself and everyone else a favor: Get out of your job. It used to be that whoever bought the biggest case of booze at Christmas would get the account the next year. No more."