On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Kevin Dupuy <kevin.dupuy@opensuse.org> wrote:
This is an entire other thread in which I agree with N B Day. At the very least, the box should be able to be purchased from other merchants, even online, like Amazon or BustBuy.com. This would improve the experience at least, as those merchants would already have the box in hand and be able to ship it out on time.
Stocking through those merchants is non-trivial. I don't recall offhand the hurdles to Amazon, but I know BestBuy requires some minimum volume and typically there's an expectation of additional fees related to Best Buy's marketing & being on shelves. Best Buy, for example, doesn't just want a cut of the retail price - they want a stocking fee, they want kickbacks for marketing and being in their fliers. To justify the overhead that goes with being on Amazon, in Best Buy and really making a major push to be in a large number of shops, we'd need to have several multiples of the sales we have now. (Sure, there's the "well, you *would* sell several multiples of current sales if you were in those outlets, but experience so far hasn't borne that out since many people are quite happy to download openSUSE without paying for a box at all.) Physical distribution is fairly complicated, and dealing with major outlets like Amazon and Best Buy even more so. Without major sales volume, it's simply not worth the hassle or costs. I wish we could do more in this area, but there are many areas we need to focus on and we have to choose where we can be most effective in terms of distributing openSUSE. I'm really sorry that we've missed the shipping date for purchasers of the openSUSE 11.1 box. Assuming there will be a box, we will try to ensure that the 11.2 retail box doesn't have the same issue. If we don't have a release date that falls between a few major holidays, I think that will help us be more successful. Best, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier openSUSE Community Manager jzb@zonker.net http://zonker.opensuse.org/ http://blogs.zdnet.com/community/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org