Excess packaging with software
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!)
May 29th, 2009 at 6:56 am
In the pre Visual Studio days, I’m pretty sure that Microsoft’s first C/C++ complier came on the 3.5″ disks. In one sense, the fact that so much storage is available on DVD’s in a pity, because it encourages people to be verbose and include lots of unnecessary stuff. I think it was Sir Winston Churchill who insisted that his ministers should précis topics onto a side of foolscap paper for him to digest. If software writers had to précis their work onto a few 3.5″ disks, then our hard disks wouldn’t be filled up with garbage that never gets used!
Paul
June 4th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Aaah. That’s nothing. HP seem to be repeat offenders at that:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/enormouse/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/hp_packaging/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/21/more_hp_packaging/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/opteron_outrage/