Review Think Quarterly, or a new fashion for magazines from IT giants

Continuing the policy of aggressive absorption of new markets, Google masters the space of glossy electronic magazines. The first issue of Think Quarterly magazine (Think Quarterly) devoted to the problems of modern data overflow is quite predictable for this step: a thoughtful design (the magazine has html, flash and pdf versions ), the necessary regularity (once a quarter), thought out a grid of articles (see the title picture ), a naked self-PR and a almost zero semantic component.
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There is no classical rubrication in the journal - navigation through its content is carried out with the help of tags, in the pdf-version connected by colored threads.
The texts in TQ are written by the hands of the British: the first half of the authors of the magazine work in the largest British newspapers and research institutes, the second few years ago fled from the overcast Kingdom to sunny California.

Texts are the saddest thing in Think Quarterly.
But it’s not about them, after all ...

In theory, TQ is designed to carry the practical value of modern IT entrepreneurs - the words “enterprise” and “business” persist in annotations to the magazine and the leads of most publications - but the feeling is that the authors are locked in admiring objects of their articles, be it a person or modern technology. As a result, reading Think Quarterly turns into a narcissism session: the functionality of the articles is nominal. To the credit of the authors, of course, it should be noted that the main trends are fixed. But if your work duties do not include the daily processing of terabytes of information or the management of a large corporation, it’s probably useless to look for practical application articles.

For example, an article about a top manager of Vodafone , in fact, tells how cleverly this corporation handles the traffic of its own mobile network, and the seemingly cute professor who invented a system of cultural value assessment and now successfully providing relevant services for clients like Volkswagen explains his innovation in a post interview. This can be read (and even necessary) for investors and Google business partners, and not for a wide audience.

It seemed that it would be possible to relax with articles about creative advertising on the Internet or beautiful pictures from the field of information storage and processing, but in the first case attention is suspiciously focused on the Google advertising service, and in the second - in one row with the telegraph and compass, Google Earth Engine . Plaque samopiara does not give the opportunity to surrender pleasure to the end.

Conclusion

The first issue of the journal Think Quarterly can not read. An interesting magazine will be possible numbers from the 4th (October 2011). But it should also be noted that we are likely to be present when a new trend is emerging - a glossy e-magazine from the leaders of the IT industry.
We are waiting for iMagazine and J.Journal ...