One, Mandrake don't make much money on boxes. They pay people to make the boxes, they pay to duplicate the CDs, they pay to print the manuals, they pay for distribution, and they have to sell wholesale to the retailers.
So why bother at all then? Where are they selling the boxed sets now? Online only?
I expect the money they saved by stopping bothering with the US office, the workers, the distribution and so on is probably more than they made from selling boxes in the US in the FIRST place.
Well, until middle-class America and their non-credit-card-holding but free- living-at-home and part-time-job-holding kids start doing all their shopping online, probably the largest market of disposable income in the world is being left untapped.
There has to be a way to sell such a cool product to presently-unaware- America, hasn't there?
Austin
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Austin Acton
Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto
MandrakeLinux Volunteer Developer, homepage: www.groundstate.ca