November 2nd, 2005
When did the shrink-wrap era really end?
Microsoft has announced the end of the shrink-wrap era with a new set of services it calls Microsoft Live.
But didn’t the shrink-wrap era really end years ago?
I believe the shrinkwrap era ended when the Internet era began, in the mid-1990s. Netscape wasn’t bought at stores, it was downloaded. RealAudio, Flash, toolbars — all downloaded.
The open source movement, in fact, is all about downloads. Most open source projects define their success based, first, on the number of times a project has been downloaded. The attempts by some to shrink-wrap open source products and sell them at the cost of packaging have, on the whole, been failures.
In fact I haven’t bought a Microsoft software product from a store in years. Instead, I acquired them with my hardware. They were delivered by my OEM or a manufacturer. And it’s updated online.
What Microsoft has done today is to try and tilt the market’s reality back into a proprietary direction, placing a new business model on an old reality. The plan is to have a variety of paid tiers for online versions of Office, delivering basic functionality for the price of looking at ads, and more functions as you pay more.
That is a sea change. Microsoft is moving toward a business model first pioneered in the mid-1990s by America Online.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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