what is a efficient economical way for software?

[jayson]

  what is a efficent, economical way for software companies to provide a service release to software license owners?   plz help!

[merlin_2]

Demos.........

[gussery]

Assuming the patches are not huge, the a web site with patches listed so the customer can apply them when they want to.

If the patches are huge, CDs and Postage are cheap.  Having a customer service person available to answer to the phone to request CDs is not cheap.

[Computer_Commando]

Sounds like a homework question.

[johnwill]

Let's see, all the major suppliers use web based software update services...  Doesn't sound like a very tough problem to me, since it's been solved thousands of times in the industry, and 99% of the times it was web based updates!  

[Joleen]

We send a disk to about 150 of our dealers with the update.  This is neither cheap nor easy.  we also provide the update online.  This is super cheap and so easy it seems like stealing.  The reason for the two methods is net speed.  If a dealer has a dial-up connection then they'll never get the update online.

[johnwill]

For really huge updates, I can see the physical media for folks that don't have broadband.  However, major software vendors seem to limit you to web updates, even with large files.  Symantec has no way to update any of their stuff besides the Internet, for instance.

However, the question was efficient and economical.