Larry & all,
ESD will certainly be a part of the future of software distribution. The application of this method however is directly proportional to bandwidth. If ADSL is commonly employed and the net will finally use Gigabit-speed backbones, making the backend-pipe Internut finally faster than 500Kb/sec (which seems to be the current maximum achievable) then ESD will totally replace shrink-warp. This should shift the balance of power from software giants to software distribution houses but that's years away for those massive office applications and / or the geek software types (compilers etc.).
However for small utilities, ESD is working NOW. Imagine, yesterday I decided to try out a new utility that's supposed to accelerate web-surfing by refreshing, cashing - readahead like in the background. This utility, Peakjet 2, is provided by a small Canadian Company called "Peak Software" www.peak.com. They are traded on the OTC in the US and in Canada and they are selling directly on the net. A trial version was promoted at XOOM, that's how I tapped into it. The software is updating itself automatically if you want, and after trying it out the whole night yesterday I think that while it's a great program and concept - and it does work - it needs some refinement on some edges. Anyway it's a 6MB program and I downloaded it on my cablemodem within less than a minute. I then paid approx. $20 by secure-credit cart transmission. This is the future but as I said, currently limited to the utility scene. Even Symantec is going into this direction (You can download NU 3.0 norton utilities for less than $100)
But this is clearly the more distant future. In the meantime, we are exploiting the next years to come. When the time is ripe to do it all by ESD, PROG will be doing its own or acquire one of the model-providers. Let's put it here bluntly, we all here had a privillege, getting into PROG at $8-12. From now on people will have to cough up much more. Isnt' that nice ?? <g>
best regards
CROSSY |
