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

Integrated ESD with TigerDirect.com

A shameless plug indeed!

Ok, so I'm somewhat biased since I work for Protexis and had a hand in getting this service live, but it's quite a milestone. One of the biggest drawbacks of traditional Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) was that it was confined to the Software Publisher's online stores or Affiliates. IE, you could not purchase an downloadable version unless you went through the publisher. Thats fine if you shop that way, but most of us shop through larger online stores.

Online retail stores like TigerDirect and Amazon are huge and until now, none have offered ESD integrated into their catalog. You could not browse and add hardware and downloadable software to your cart and then transact. Very odd indeed but true.

TigerDirect is revolutionary in that they have integrated an downloadable software catalog into their existing offering allowing their customers full access to ESD. They can purchase a 19" LCD and a copy of CA's AntiVirus and after completing the transaction they get the LCD shipped and an email sent to them with the URL and keys to download the CA product.

Very cool.

• Link to announcement
• ESD products on TigerDirec.com

~chris

Disney acknowledges the 'Piracy Business Model'

Anne Sweeney (Co-chair at Disney) gave a keynote address this week at Mipcom. Ms Sweeney's main topic was content piracy and Disney's new stance on accepting the fact that this in not a plague, as so much as it is a competing business model.

On the subject of content, she had some very interesting and maybe even prolific ideas: "Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."

So I've always been a big fan of the content/king thing and I've understood that this was a stepping stone to the big goal of full convergence. Conversation is also a stepping stone, but its more in line with web 2.0/3.0 ideals. MySpace is a great example of this. The content on MySpace would not be worth nearly as much, if not for the fact that its magnified by the connections into other people's content. Those conversations and shared environments are force multipliers!

Original link Boing-boing

~ chris

Windows Marketplace receives a facelift

More than that, Windows Marketplace has added enhancements to their interface including true integration into the Digital Locker. Digital Locker allows Windows OS users to manage their downloads, recover and re-download content from publishers and online retailers.

All of this is good news for the ESD industry because it centralizes the download process and it gives exposure to relatively unknown titles. The big caveat is that software shared or sold in the Marketplace needs to be Windows compatible, which makes perfect sense considering the environment.

An obvious strength of this system is that Microsoft is partnering with multiple content providers like Protexis and AskNet. In doing so, they are not limiting the size or diversity of their titles, all of which makes it an attractive choice for consumers unfamiliar with purchasing electronically.

See the full press release http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060828/sfm036.html?.v=64

~ chris

Long Tail of Software Publishing

I think its very important for ever business person, regardless of role and scope, to constantly educate themselves on the changing business environment. My personal favorite is web 2.0 concepts. The long tail idea is one of those concepts that galvanizes some of the main concepts of web 2.0.

Long tail has several key points of relevance in business but within the publishing world, it provides some unique opportunities to delve into how a publisher can create incremental value by not concentrating on the core users or functionality of their product.



So how can you capitalize on this concept? It starts with taking a close look at how your product is used by your customers. Take the graph above and tailor it to your own business. What are the core functional interactions (TBYB, purchase etc) and what happens after these interactions are completed? What further interactions can you leverage to create more value for your customer and yourself? Even if the purchase might be the most important part of the interaction, it’s the everything else that happens after the purchase that is important to the user. The interaction should not end with the transaction, but in fact it should be the start of a long-term relationship that allows for multiple revenue generating interactions.

Ultimately, you goal is to crate more opportunities with your customer and the long tail gives you a starting point to understanding these opportunities. Here is a great blog from Joe Kraus on software and Longtail.

- chris

Figuring out how to deliver your software to the world has to be one of the simplest choices you have to make as an independent software publisher. I say its easy because you really want to get your titles into as many channels as possible, with the least amount of fuss.

The SIIA did some research and found that more that three-quarters of the publishers they surveyed see the creation of new distributions channels as their main method of future growth.

How do you identify those top channels or, even better, how do you identify the new channels. Are there new channels for promoting your ESD titles these days?

These are tougher questions to answer and I'd be interested in hearing your feedback. But until then here are my suggestions:

1. Challenge your existing channels to meet their quotas and beyond. ParetoLogic recently challenged their affiliates to outsell ParetoLogic's top affiliate with the winner driving away a Harley Davidson motor bike. Will this work? I'm not sure but it will definitely capture the interest and imagination of their partners.
2. Get back to basics and identify how your customer finds your product. Create relationships with organizations that can support this discovery behavior by either sharing the revenue or allowing for upsells. Does your product have complimentary hardware? The best example of this was my former employer, ACD Systems bundling their photo management software with Pentax cameras.

Please provide your thoughts on this challenge as I'm very interested in learning about your collective experience.

- chris