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