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Technology Stocks : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (1148)	10/27/1998 1:35:00 PM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2025

I've been looking at the difference of online software purchases, and hardware for that matter, and buying at the local store and one can save a lot buying from the web. Advantages also seem to be no sales tax in some cases. Disadvantage you have to wait and it maybe more hassle to do a return. I currently am shopping for Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking V 3 Preferred Edition. It costs about $179 at Compusa, but $157.95 from Beyond.com. Still, if they have it at Costco, they have the best prices, but they have no dictation software at this time. Beyond.com also has an interesting listing of best sellers if you want to know what's hot. beyond.com I also tried egghead.com but they offer older titles at reduced prices. Again, I think in the days of falling prices on PC's, we are still seeing lots of unit sales. Seems like a winning story for software vendors. Any recommendations on the best place to buy software online? Regards, Mark PS Encarta 99 is free with a rebate on beyond.com

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (1148)	10/27/1998 4:07:00 PM
From: Pierre-X	Respond to of 2025

Re: Digital music demo Very astute observation! There is potentially a large market for machines that take this concept to a the level of scale: you've all seen the demo stations at music stores which have a CD-changer built into them, and you choose the CD from a menu. With MP3 or similar compression schemes one could easily design a demo machine that could store thousands or tens of thousands of albums, not just six! * You could easily design the machine to play back only the first 30 seconds or so of a song. * You could easily design the machine to accept AUTOMATIC updates from the publishers over a Net connection. * You could link such a machine to your store's inventory database which would inform shoppers if you had a particular CD in stock, and even instruct the shopper where in the store to find it. * You could set up many VERY INEXPENSIVE ($300) listening stations pulling down the music over a LAN from a central server. * You could easily design the machine to burn selected albums or even individual tracks to a CD. Just the beginning of the possibilities ...