Great article from ZNet's Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft's Money moving from the physical box to the digital download... completely. They state that this does not mean they're dropping all boxed product but its a reality of the changing market for Microsoft Money. This is great news and its fits nicely into what I've been talking about for the last four years.

Microsoft to stop selling boxed copies of Money Plus by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley -- Microsoft has decided against releasing a 2009 version of Money Plus, its personal-finance-management software. The company also is planning to discontinue selling Money Plus as a boxed software product at retail -- but insisted the move shouldn't be interpreted as an immediate move away from shrink-wrapped PC software.

~chris

Hidden Sundials

I was searching in Vancouver for a car rental dealership and bumped into this massive sundial on top of a mall near Chinatown. It’s the International Village Mall off of Pender Street. In looking at the Google maps for the area I turned on the satellite view and discovered a huge sundial on top of the mall. I consider myself pretty well informed about my own hometown but I had no idea this clock existed. As you can see, it looks like the satellite tool this photo at about 9am. The massive residential tower to the south-east of the clock actually acts as the sundial. Very cool, especially when you consider that nobody knows about this?

Xbox no to Blu-ray, yes to digital distribution

As per my previous blog about Bill Watkins poo-pooing the whole Blu-ray/HD thing, Microsoft announced they're not adding Blu-ray to their Xbox lineup. Why not? Microsoft predicts that the new Blu-ray will be irrelevant in 12-18 months! Booyeah! This is mostly due to the fact that they'll expect their customers to download the products directly out from Xbox Live. Link via Slinux

~chris

The Quiet Revolution

Fast forward – April 12, 2011

“Its not really all that difficult to figure out how the retail software industry got into this mess. It started with Steve Jobs announcing the release of the Macbook Air at MacWorld in Jan of 2008. This was the first big push of a major computer maker to promote 100% reliance on digital distribution. The MacBook Air released without an optical drive and soon after that all major PC makers were release their own versions of ultra thin laptops… that could not load DVDs or CDs. By Nov 2009, 80% of the laptops being sold without a DVD/CD drive. This created a bigger and bigger reliance on downloadable software.

At almost the same time of the MacBook Air release Amazon was testing the waters of Electronic Software Distribution with Turbo Tax. Later in 2008 Amazon would release a complete catalog of digital distributed software products to compliment their eBook, music and movie e-distribution. iTunes followed suit in 2009 with a massive catalog of downloadable Mac and PC software games available through iTunes. Every major games publisher clamoured to get their titles into Valve’s digital channel, ‘Steam’.

And retailer’s were left holding the bag (or box as it were…). Boxed software diminished faster than physical record sales in the early 2000’s and consumers now had very little choice when it came to securing digital product. They could either go directly to the publisher or through iTunes/Amazon channels. Publishers also had it difficult as both Apple and Amazon forced the publishers to reduce their margins as a condition of gaining access to their online stores.

Demand for software was bigger than ever and very quietly, a handful of companies like Apple, Amazon and Valve cornered the consumer software market.”

Selling boxed software online... Nuns in a tree fort...

Yes, that's my analogy. Selling boxed software online and then shipping it to the end user makes as much sense as Nuns in a tree fort. I mean c'mon! At Macworld J-man announced the Macbook Air... a sexy little laptop and guess what? No optical drive! The only way you're getting software on that bad-boy is to either buy an external drive or, wait for it.... download it! We are moving quickly and steadily towards a point where the very idea of building a digital product, moving it to a physical piece of media for transportation only to convert it back to digital for use on our PC will seem as sensible as renting movies via the post office (wait for it...).

The best quote of January comes from Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins. He's being interviewed by Wired Magazine and they ask him about the battle between BluRay and HD... "Well maybe Blu-Ray won, but it's a meaningless victory. ... Because guess what: People are going to download everything." You rock Bill.

~ chris