On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 23:33, John Wilson wrote: > 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 :-)
I was being conservative for Canada and generous for the US. Oh and I heard an add today for a DSL broadband provider. The disclaimer was "Speed increases over dialup are for download only and may not differ from dialup speeds on upload". (or words to that affect.) Shees with attitudes like that it's no wonder broadband service penetration is actually going down in the US. James > > > 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 > > > ______________________________________________________________________ > Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? > Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
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