Why aren't they selling software on thumbdrives yet?

[Fritzo]

CD's and DVD's are fragile and too big to store conveniently. I just read somewhere that a 1GB thumbdrive now costs about .18 to manufacture. Why can't I get things like Windows 7 or games on thumbdrives yet?

 

[nerp]

Force of habit. And they're working on online distribution more than yet another phyiscal medium.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Because DVDs are cheaper than 4GB thumbdrives...

 

[Kalmah]

It would be awesome to do away with my ridiculous cd case in exchange for some type of thumbdrive case.

 

[jonks]

Can a USB drive be made read only? Even if it can, a dvd-r cannot be made into a rewritable but I bet an enterprising individual can make a 1gb "read only" usb key read/writeable. Why would the industry want to sell a product on a medium capable of being tampered with?

 

[FoBoT]

Because DVDs are cheaper than 4GB thumbdrives...

yes, a blank DVD in mass quntity is a few cents, a 4 GB flash is still a few dollars or at least one dollar, even in bulk (non-alternator shape)

i think software will skip over to mainly direct downloads from the internet, and go away from physical media altogether

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Well instead of online distrobution which would be nice, but not really practical for everyone. Why not have kiosks in stores. Go to kiosk, purchase the software you want, insert your thumb drive and the kiosk transfers the data to it? No packaging required.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Can a USB drive be made read only? Even if it can, a dvd-r cannot be made into a rewritable but I bet an enterprising individual can make a 1gb "read only" usb key read/writeable. Why would the industry want to sell a product on a medium capable of being tampered with?

The pendrive infront of me can be locked (read only).

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Can a USB drive be made read only? Even if it can, a dvd-r cannot be made into a rewritable but I bet an enterprising individual can make a 1gb "read only" usb key read/writeable. Why would the industry want to sell a product on a medium capable of being tampered with?

What does it matter if it is read only or not? If I bought it and wiped the data off of it so what. What is Adobe out if the drive they had their software gets used for something else?
In fact, a USB drive can be used like a HASP key and a unique identifier on the drive in a non re-writeable portion can act as the activation code. Install software, software looks for this code and authenticates the install, calls home to register and your done.
With bootbale USB now it's time for CD/DVD to die. No more scratched disks, or warped disks. Machines can be made even smaller without the limitations of still needing a 5.25" drive bay.

 

[DrawninwarD]

I think they should focus on online content delivery, but using thumbdrives isn't such a bad idea. And ISPs need to lower their ridiculous bandwidth caps, especially in Canada.


Recently, I needed the Windows 7 boot disc in order to fix my installation on my laptop. I couldn't find a single empty DVD, so I used my 4GB USB drive and the Windows 7 ISO to make a Windows 7 boot USB drive.

 

[shortylickens]

Long ago it was obvious we would go from optical drives to online distribution.
We were lucky to get flash memory. It bridged the gap between floppy disks and optical discs in terms of ease & capacity, (Iomega Zip drives were nice but never mainstream).
But given how easy and fast it is to upload massive files and share them across the world in a split second, it doesnt make sense for the industry to go to another physical medium.

 

[her209]

Long ago it was obvious we would go from optical drives to online distribution.
We were lucky to get flash memory. It bridged the gap between floppy disks and optical discs in terms of ease & capacity, (Iomega Zip drives were nice but never mainstream).
But given how easy and fast it is to upload massive files and share them across the world in a split second, it doesnt make sense for the industry to go to another physical medium.

They could even move to using Bittorrent as a distribution model for new (popular) software.

 

[jonks]

What does it matter if it is read only or not? If I bought it and wiped the data off of it so what. What is Adobe out if the drive they had their software gets used for something else?

You're not thinking of the security perspective. It's like asking why would Tylenol put a seal on their bottles. If Tylenol used a simple snapopen cap and some psycho put poison in the bottles, Tylenol might just suffer on the PR and sales front.

If Symantec decided to distribute their software via USB drives, and some group, for the hell of it, inserted a virus onto those drives, Symantec would be blamed for using a medium prone to security risks. Remember floppy disks? Yech.

DVDs cannot be rewritten and are almost costless to manufacture. .18 sounds cheap, but that's 18x higher that .01, and when you produce millions of products, that's a lot of money.

 

[feralkid]

It's been done. CA internet security has been available on a 2 GB flash card for years.

 

[darkxshade]

Flash drives are just not economical enough on a cost basis. Even if it costs .18 to manufacture compared to say .05(Random guess, prob lower) for a DVD disc. When you think about the bottom line, when you produce say 10 million copies, that's a cost savings of 1.3 million dollars.

It also doesn't make sense to pay for facilities to manufacture and produce flash drives for pc when the infrastructure is alredy in place to produce discs since most games are made for consoles anyway and at the moment the medium are DVDs/BR.

 

[Train]

Didn't ARS have an article a few weeks back about Windows 7 being sold on flash drives, just not in the US?

err, nevermind, it was ILLEGAL copies of Win7 being sold on thumbdrives in China.

 

[tw1164]

It's been done. CA internet security has been available on a 2 GB flash card for years.

I've seen Norton AV on thumbdrives, Staples sells them.


staples.com

 

[jlee]

Flash drives are just not economical enough on a cost basis. Even if it costs .18 to manufacture compared to say .05(Random guess, prob lower) for a DVD disc. When you think about the bottom line, when you produce say 10 million copies, that's a cost savings of 1.3 million dollars.

It also doesn't make sense to pay for facilities to manufacture and produce flash drives for pc when the infrastructure is alredy in place to produce discs since most games are made for consoles anyway and at the moment the medium are DVDs/BR.

There's a lot more to software than games.

 

[darkxshade]

There's a lot more to software than games.

I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense to build the infrastructure to produce software in 2 types of media, one for pc, one for consoles(of which there are unarguably nothing but games), when they can just bunch the production into one manufacturing process to save on costs. Giant software companies are all about making money. Consumers get their software either way so why throw more money away by doing it with flash drives when a disc is just as effective. It might work as a gimmick at first but in the end, I doubt customer cares how they get their software. That's why they are trying to transition it into online distribution, it saves even more money than your traditional dvd.

 

[jonks]

I've seen Norton AV on thumbdrives, Staples sells them.


staples.com

Then I sit corrected. I've never seen that. I tend to buy digital.

Maybe it is just the cost then.

 

[ktehmok]

Another issue is that not every computer has a front USB port. Especially older ones. Can you imagine 80 year old grandma Beatrice trying to get under the desk & plug in a thumb drive for the latest Norton AV?

 

[Fritzo]

Can a USB drive be made read only? Even if it can, a dvd-r cannot be made into a rewritable but I bet an enterprising individual can make a 1gb "read only" usb key read/writeable. Why would the industry want to sell a product on a medium capable of being tampered with?

Yeah! Nobody would ever release software on a medium you can tamper with!

 

[KeithP]

I think it probably has more to do with how you get the data on the media.

DVDs & CDs, once they are pressed are ready to go. A USB key has to have the data written to it, does it not? This would greatly complicate the manufacturing process.

-KeithP

 

[RoloMather]

Can a USB drive be made read only? Even if it can, a dvd-r cannot be made into a rewritable but I bet an enterprising individual can make a 1gb "read only" usb key read/writeable. Why would the industry want to sell a product on a medium capable of being tampered with?

Floppies. . .

 

[jonks]

Yeah! Nobody would ever release software on a medium you can tamper with!

I've already recanted, but pray tell, what was the widely available alternative to floppies during their period of ubiquity?