Moin, first, please calm down. As the product manager of openSUSE I'd like to give some backround information on the retail box in general and give some explanation of the late delivery in North America (see #6) 1) the market for Linux distributions changed heavily over the last 3-5 years in direction of free downloads. Reasons for that are mainly the availability of broad band and the fact that literally all distributions are available for free download. 2) the fact that we started the openSUSE project in summer 2005 with free download from day one combined with the availability of most Linux distributions for free made our retail sales numbers spiralling down 3) Sales numbers in NA became so low that it was tough to get into retail shops anymore, eg. to be in BestBuys on the shelf you need to stuff 600 shops with 5 boxes each and you'll receive after the sales period kind of 50% back as in retail you can get on the shelf only if you give full return right. 4) We need to be realistic. An operating system for a retailer is not as important as digital cameras, music players, game consoles etc. which are purchased by consumers like mad. A Linux OS is a niche product in retail. And in general the software space (beside of games) has dramatically shrunken down in the past years). I visited the other day a retailer in my area and had a chat with a sales guy there. They seized down the software area by 2/3 compared to 2005 and even security software and Windows OS was tough to find. 5) With Sales numbers going down over all, production of boxes in NA became more and more expensive per unit. To stay at least little profitable we do the production meanwhile in Germany. And to keep the retail box available in NA we offer it only through shopNovell as the retail box is not interesting anymore for retailers in NA. At least not for the vast majority. 6) Through production in Germany we had from 10.2 on always a delay between delivery to Germany and EMEA and especially to North America due to air freight, customs, delivery to stock etc. The delay to North America has been always around 5-8 working days. Unfortunately this time we have Christmas + the vacation period - which nobody could have foreseen :-( - which lead to a much longer delay. 7) Beside others Novell's and openSUSE's goal is to increase the distribution of our Linux distribution. As the retail market is an challenging and expensive place to be and the portion of retail has shrunken to less then 5% (and kind of 90% of them are purchased Germany) out of all installations our focus is clearly on the download version. I hope the explanation helps. And sorry for no better news for box lovers. If we'd seen a way to sell again many boxes in a profitable way we definitely would. Our Exec's would love this as with that openSUSE directly could sponsor the openSUSE project. With today's set up my biggest concern is how to get openSUSE into the hands of people living in areas with no or limited broad band access? Those people - and there are many - can't buy a box nor download openSUSE. This is something zonker, Martin and others are working currently on. Best Michl On Tuesday 23 December 2008, Stephan Binner wrote:
On Tuesday 23 December 2008 04:47:12 Kevin Dupuy wrote:
As I said earlier, there is an expectation that paying customers would at least be treated as well as normal users who download the product and receive their package on or near the same date as release.
Nothing can beat the ease and speed of online software distribution :-) - the reason why traditional software retail businesses are declining for years.
At the very least, the box should be able to be purchased from other merchants, even online, like Amazon or BustBuy.com.
I'm pretty sure we had this discussion also with last releases (search the archives?) and iirc there was no wholesaler found for this distribution.
What needs to be done is to figure out how to prevent this in the future
Do you want to suggest to delay public availability to three weeks after GM?
Bye, Steve
-- Michael Löffler, Product Management SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org