On September 16, 2003 09:29 pm, James Sparenberg wrote: <snip> > It sounds good except for one thing. In the developed world the US has > less than half the broadband penetration of any other country. (Canada has > about a 50% penetration, Korea 80% the US only 20%)
Actually Canada is now up to about 70%. Dial up is mainly a disaster recovery tool now. The figure in the major centres (Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal) is something like 85%. Most of the sales battles on high speed now are on price and reliablity, ADSL vs Cable, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and undocumented speed increases :-) > Did the sales fall off > because people downloaded, (Gael's contention.) or did it start falling off > because it took 3 months after release to get it in the stores.(my > observation) It's funny cause 7.2 and 8.0 were very rapid to the shelves in Canada. After than it slowed to a crawl. I'd say that your observation may have as much to do with is as the download situation. > > Are people downloading to save money, or, are they downloading just to get > the product. No I don't have all the data, Gael has more. But, the 20% > drop in sales is consistent with the drop other software vendors and > retailers are seeing across the board. My next question is. Why aren't > SuSE, Red Hat, Walnut Creek (FreeBSD) Wasabi (NetBSD) and others cutting > back on retail? They sell to the same demographic. Shouldn't they have > similar problems? I'm sure they are. They do seem willing to package for the store shelves to maintain a high level of public visibility which is important if you want to get your name into people's heads. Heck, I even saw the last edition of Caldera/SCO Open Linux (now there's a joke and a half) on the shelves at a computer store! There could be one additional contention here on Geal's part, unspoken. That is that people download a package and then share it around. That too could cause the number of packaged boxes to go down even where the high speed situation is a mess like in the US. ttfn John
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