Article

Top 100: 6. Digital delivery of products

June 24, 2010

Not very long ago, buying new computer software meant driving to the store and purchasing something in a cardboard box; buying music meant another drive, this time to retrieve a round object of one size or another that contained the data. If you wanted a book, you went to a bookstore and purchased a physical product; renting a movie also meant another stop on the way home, and another physical item in-hand.

All of those products are now delivered 100 percent electronically, with the speed of adoption picking up in the past year. Amazon’s Kindle device has not only made e-books viable after years of false starts, it has turned them into a bona fide impulse buy. Netflix introduced its "Watch Instantly" service for thousands of films, and integration with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 brought that data stream to the television set, taking the cable and pay-per-view industries head-on.

One of the most innovative digital delivery platforms, and one of the most beloved by its customers, is Steam, the game-delivery system owned and operated by game developer Valve. Once installed on a PC, Steam serves up hundreds of games that are available instantly, from Valve’s catalog as well as other developers.

Steam takes customer convenience up a notch with its iTunes-like delivery and account structure: Buy a game once, and you can then install it as many times as you want, on whatever computer you may be using. Steam does the work of making sure the game is only in use on one machine at any given time, eliminating the need for DRM. But for the customer, it means that lost CDs are no longer a worry, and moving software to a new computer is as simple as firing up the Steam application and telling it to re-download.

Download the complete Top 100.