I remember the days of Microsoft Visual Basic 3.00 Professional Edition which came in a mammoth box full of manuals and media (I think it was CD already back then rather than the 3.5″ disks like Windows 3.11). Over the years software boxes have got smaller, with the ’standard’ size now being about the size of a three DVD cases stacked up. This seems to the the size Adobe, Microsoft, etc. adopt.

I’ve recently purchased some new software/upgrades and I was amazed that inside a big box, we still only had so little contents; just a DVD box in fact..

However, this dwarfed the waste which Norton Internet Security 2009 demonstrated:

Of course, this is so that they can produce product shots like this:

All this for one CD and a leaflet–I guess it’s at least not wasting trees printing manuals no one will read (unlike Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 which includes a one inch thick manual which includes several languages!)