Well, I went to the mall area and sat and drank a cup of coffee at Barnes & Noble and studied the magazine rack a bit.
Magazine racks tend to reflect the current mindset of the general populace, you can count the number and type of magazines to see what sort of stuff folks are interested in. It has always been a reliable indicator in the past anyway.
Since Barnes & Noble is a British based company that is acting sorta sick right now, this indicator metric may be skewed a bit since they no longer distribute certain brands of magazines at all ..... so what I see may be an effect of Britishness or of fiscal sickness, I guess we will never know which or why -- or maybe it is real, who knows?
In any case, here is the current magazine mix in the Tech Section of Barnes & Noble.
50% Android
40% Apple/Mac
9% Open Source (Ubuntu & all the rest)
1% Windows/Xbox
Wii ain't out on the rack at all, nor is Sony .... gamebox type stuff seems to have declined most drastically.
Microsoft Windows based publications really aren't there either -- the PC Magazine was full of gaming rigs and "best games" for Christmas and the Maximum PC rig was full of store bought gaming rigs for best Christmas purchase. And that was it for PC.
Apple/Mac was full of conjecture about what Apple will release for this Christmas and Android was talking a lot about Android L and 64 bit. Open Source was about the future Ubuntu release and running Ubuntu on Chromeboxes. There were more Chromebook/box related articles dominating the Open Source magazines than there were Windows articles in total in all magazines.
Microsoft Windows 8.1 has a practically zero mind share at this point in time. It is old news and nobody seems concerned about it at all any more. There were NO ARTICLES PREDICTING IMPROVEMENTS IN WIN 9 OR WHEN IT WILL BE RELEASED, something I found somewhat ominous this late in the game.
Speaking of it being "late in the game" ol' MS has just told the world they are killing off software support for Win 7 sometimes next year.
MS is hurting for money, apparently ....If they are serious about killing off Win 7 two years earlier than previously said then this is
very bad for MS's future trust levels as no one will trust them for very much of anything going forward from that point.
They killed off XP when it was a 30% market share and now they plan to kill off Win 7 when it is at 50% market share? How
dumb do they think we are ????
You are supposed to gently milk them durn milk cows, you don't go off shooting them in the head just so you can sell off the stew beef ....
.... not unless you are planning on getting completely out of the cattle business when you are done.