The song remains the same

My career in publishing started 10 years ago as a tester in PC Magazine Labs (there were a couple of other careers before that, but that's another story), and now it's now come full circle.

Losing the print version of PC Magazine was a sad experience for everyone involved, but I'm happy to announce that one of its fundamental components, PC Magazine Labs, is to not only continue but significantly expand its influence.

Renamed VNU Labs, the team consists almost entirely of ex-PC Magazine Labs staff, headed up by myself. Paul Monckton (Senior Project Manager), will be looking after our technical direction and test development; Simon Crisp and Alexander Arias (Project Managers) will be calling on their years of expertise to generate the reliable, repeatable labs information that PC Magazine Labs was always famous for. And not forgetting Alan Rider (Stores Supervisor), the indispensable man behind the scenes who keeps the whole process rolling along smoothly.

But that's not all. In addition to supporting the new electronic version of PC Magazine (see below for details of how to sign up for your free copy), our tests and methodologies will also be used by Personal Computer World, Computeractive and IT Week as well as the other IT print titles in the VNU stable. We've got a lot of other exciting plans for the future, but I'm afraid you'll have to wait to hear more details on those.

The American essayist Clarence Day once said: 'Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.' It's only the extensive experience of VNU Labs' staff that adds value to the data we collect: The experience to understand what the test results are saying; the experience to spot spurious results; theexperience to develop new test methodologies for new technology as it appears.

We keep no secrets from our readers or manufacturers, we've no magic formulas or patents -- we use industry-standard tools and methods that are available to anyone. The difference is our philosophy -- if we can't reproduce a result or can't explain what it means, then we've failed and won't use the results.Anyone can obtain numbers from benchmarks, but not everyone can interpret them. That's the crucial difference that has always been -- and will continue to be --our main strength.

We're looking forward to building on the wealth of knowledge we've accumulated during our years at PC Magazine Labs -- the name may have changed, but the song most definitely remains the same.

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