Software vendors appear to be shifting away from providing installation disks for their products. This post discusses this trend and looks at some of the implications to the Caribbean region.<\/em><\/p>\n
The new operating system for Mac computers, the OS X Lion, was released in late July. However, prior to its release Apple announced that this programme would be available for download from the Mac App Store only. Hence no installation CDs of the programme would be produced, and neither would it be available for purchase at other retail stores.<\/p>\n
This approach to software distribution is a growing trend. The manufacture of installation CDs is on the decline, instead software applications must be purchased and downloaded online. Further, and as discussed in Is it really in the Clouds? How 5 stated trends in Cloud Computing really stack up<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, the situation is being encouraged by a number of factors, including:<\/p>\n
However, in the Caribbean, as in many developing countries, basic broadband service (2 Mbps download) is still costly if available, and not particularly reliable.\u00a0 More importantly, it might be near impossible to maintain reasonable connectivity in terms of speed and reliability over the extended period of time required to successfully download and install software from the Internet. To illustrate, Table 1, provides approximate download times for the Mac OS X Lion, which is 3.49 GB. The download speeds listed are a combination of speeds recorded using online speed test facilities, and those anticipated for select broadband packages.<\/p>\n
Table 1: Approximate download times for the Mac OS X Lion using select broadband Internet packages (Calculations: www.123myip.co.uk)<\/p><\/div>\n
From the table, unless you are lucky enough to enjoy download speeds over 10 Mbps, it is increasingly likely that connectivity difficulties will be experienced. However, there are few countries in the English-speaking Caribbean where those higher speeds are available \u2013 Grenada, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Based on our recent Snapshot<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, the highest broadband speed available in most countries is 8 Mbps, which means it could take at least 2 hours to download the Lion OS.<\/p>\n
Although the unavailability of installation CDs for a popular software platform might be signalling the end of an era, it also is highlighting the fact that most of the English-speaking Caribbean is at a considerable disadvantage with respect to Internet connectivity. Although ISPs in most countries are able to offer 2 Mbps (the minimum broadband speed), this does not necessarily mean that the countries are in a position to capitalise on all of the features, products and services that are available over the Internet. Some of the implications of this situation are:<\/p>\n
Software vendors appear to be shifting away from providing installation disks for their products. This post discusses this trend and looks at some of the implications to the Caribbean region. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,17,27,11,6],"tags":[3,36,14,65],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broadband","category-caribbean","category-computing","category-ict-tech","category-internet","tag-cloud-computing","tag-devices","tag-ict4d","tag-software","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2iE1G-m4","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1368"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1430,"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions\/1430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ict-pulse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}