Retail Stores Trying Software Kiosks... Again
from the which-will-fail...-again dept
About five years ago, I was involved in a project looking at software kiosks for retail stores. The idea was that a shopper could walk up to the kiosk, select from a bunch of software titles, and the machine would pop out a receipt. Meanwhile, a second machine in the back of the store would get to work burning a CD and related artwork (and, potentially, manuals). This way, the thinking went, any software store (or, really, any store) could hold millions of software titles. However, the more I looked into it, the less exciting the idea became. First, it was just a few years before that the music industry had tried the same sort of thing - putting such kiosks in retail shops. Those kiosk had proven to be a huge failure. They broke down constantly - as publicly pounded machines are known to do. The maintenance fees were ridiculous. They also tied up customers. Depending on how many of these (somewhat expensive) kiosks you had, only one customer could use them at a time - and the process of finding the software you want is time consuming. If they want to sit at a machine and buy some software, they'll do it online at home. So, it's a bit surprising to read this article in USA Today talking about just such a software kiosk at CompUSA and suggesting that it will change the way software is sold. If anything, conditions for these sorts of machines have gotten much worse since when I was looking at them. The software retail business is much less appealing. Fewer and fewer people buy boxed software products. Computers come with much of what you need and you can download most everything else. In the few instances where boxed software is needed, many people just order online to have it shipped. The fact is that there are only a very few boxed software products that sell - so the number of items that will actually sell from such a kiosk are fairly limited - and won't have very much margin. Furthermore, the trend is clear that an increasing number of software applications are moving online to be web-based applications, rather than local applications. I honestly had to double check the date on the USA Today article to make sure it wasn't from five or six years ago when lots of people were talking about this same idea. Why they suddenly believe that everyone is going to use such a device is beyond me.
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No, I haven't read the article yet..
Say, a few software titles were kept in the store, while a whole bunch of listings were available at the end of an aisle. The kiosks would be behind the counter...and they wouldn't really be kiosks, they would be more like the touch panel screens at Starbucks.
The employees would input the list of your software selections, a program or a person would burn them to CD...ditto for any cover materials or documentation.
Maybe it could even work in music store? Not for the popular songs, but for the obscure, hard to find works by mainstream, or other, bands. You could give your request list for the obscure stuff to the kiosk guy and shop for the mainstream stuff while the program/burner guy whipped up the CD.
Just a thought that came to mind...
MLO
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commercial piracy and decentralized manufacture
The problem is, again, that CDs are priced out of sight.
A music burning machine could serve this market. I wish to god america would get on this... I mean, I hate it when I go to the store, I WANT TO BUY A CD, and they don't have it. grr... let me spend my money on yr. product, dammit. And why are CDs $18 at Virgin Megastores? And how come you can't make money doing this, when it costs less than a dollar to make a CD?
Anyone who is interested in the costs behind CD piracy, talk to me. Did you know the profit margins on pirate CDs are higher than cocaine? Did you know that the pirate music market is nearly 5 billion dollars worldwide? Did you know that every major organized crime group in the world pirates music? There is a reason why the RIAA hired the former ATF director, and it has nothing to do with P2P
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