TechRepublic had a name in the IT community as a place for IT Pros to go for information and if they have a problem, some help.

If you look at the TR articles, and Q&A [especially Q&A] you'll find that, that is no longer the case.

Most of the articles are for Chief Information Officers. Those people who have buy decision authority. While I can understand advertisers want their advertising to reach those who can actually buy stuff, that's not what TR was about "way back when" when TechRepublic was for IT Pros not CIOs. While I can't say that CIOs aren't going to come to TechRepublic, there are many many other web sites which compete for the CIOs. What does this all have to do with TROLOV? I don't think CIOs are going to be interested in it let alone provide content for it.

So there's the problem. If TechRepublic wants to cater to the CIOs or upper level management people who have buy authority so that advertisers will want to buy space, site offerings like Q&A, Discussions, and TROLOV will decline in relevence and usefulness.

The IT Support industry, those of us who are in the IT department supporting the servers, workstations, and networks of companies, not software makers or hardware manufacturers have become an industry of specialists like the medical industry. The "jack of-all-trades" IT Pro has sorta gone the way of the general practitioner in the medical field. There's very few of us anymore who know the whole thing and those of us who do, are often shunned for the specialist who is supposed to be the "expert". We no longer recommend, suggest or even evaluate products for the companies, rather the experts in a particular segment do.

It's those "experts that TR in general, need to cater to. TROLOV also needs to change it's format. While in the beginning TROLOV was for the IT Pros who often came to the site and the Discussion and Q&A forum, take a long hard look at the Discussion and Q&A forum and what is being discussed or asked and by whom.

The Q&A forum isn't a forum for IT Pros. It's a forum for consumers asking for free help. It's for some who don't have anything else better to do than think up tier 1 consumer help desk question or questions about networking to get a laugh.

Consumers and those who with nothing else better to do than ask off the wall question for a laugh certainly aren't going to provide content or watch TROLOV. TROLOV is a casualty of that.