Even leaders lose

At the end of the 80s I was paying Ziff-Davis Publishing over $12,000 per month for full page ads in newstand PC/Computing mags in order to sell over 3,000 titles of $3 floppy disks crammed with freeware and shareware. In those days, it was a labor and an art to index and fill a 5-1/4″ floppy.

This was a helluva library for its era.

But Howard Ziff then bought a worthy competitor’s library in Texas called Public Shareware and began to give titles away free as part of PCMagazine promotions.

Within four months my cashflow sunk.