Content Everywhere

Microsoft’s giant software vending machine

A customer walks into one of the new Microsoft retail stores. Inside he sees the equivalent of a giant vending machine, where he can choose from hundreds of software titles.  He selects one and zing! – there it is, all boxed up with CDs or DVDs and documentation in Microsoft packaging.

How do they do that?

Tribeka’s Softwide solution is deployed in each Microsoft store, creating discs on-demand. That allows Microsoft to offer as many titles as they like without having to stock them as physical copies.

James Stolp calls it legal piracy, but it’s much better: freshly burned and printed discs that look and work as good as the mass-produced kind. Carrefour, Tesco and others are using Softwide in similar ways.

(I’m proud to say that Rimage provides the disc publishing engines powering Softwide.)

James’ video tour of a Microsoft store includes the “software vending machine” six minutes forty seconds in.

Tribeka is doing for software and games what CreateSpace is doing for music: bridging the gap between traditional physical inventory and online content distribution.

Author: Pete Steege
Categories: Content Distribution
Tags: Carrefour, CD, content distribution, createspace, DVD, inventory, James Stolp, Microsoft, Microsoft store, retail, software, software distribution, software piracy, softwide, Tesco, Tribeka, Windows 7
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