As an extreme case, consider CorelDraw, the widely-used Windows drawing and illustration program by Ottawa's Corel Corp. CorelDraw 6 comes on four CD-ROMs, of which only the first disc contains the actual program; the other three are dedicated to "clip art" (ready-made illustrations), sample photos, utilities, and miscellanea. Need CorelDraw on floppies? Best find a comfortable chair, because you'll have to insert 50 floppy discs in exactly the right order to install the program. And the privilege will cost you: The CD version retails for $895 Canadian, but to get your hands on the floppies you'll have to cough up another $150 and submit a special order (and you still won't get the same breadth of clip art as the CD version).
"The cost to replicate those floppies alone, we're looking at about $55 Canadian," says Kerry Williams, Corel's director of operations. "It's going to cost you $150 for these diskettes. Would you not rather take that $150 and buy a CD-ROM reader?
"There is a diehard group [numbering around 50] that absolutely insisted on having those floppies. Now, I can't imagine sitting through an install of 50 floppy diskettes," Williams adds, noting that installing CorelDraw version 5, with only 13 floppies, took 45 minutes even on a Pentium machine. Life, as they say, is too short.
Copying something huge like a new operating system-- Macintosh System 7.5, OS/2 Warp, or even Windows 95-- to a hard disc can be a single-click operation using CD rather than a tedious floppy shuffle. Moreover, the cost of manufacturing CDs can be attractively low. For CorelDraw 6, four CDs cost $3 Canadian to stamp out vs. $55 for floppies. Adobe Systems Inc., the successful maker of graphic-arts software, pegs the price difference at below $1 U.S. per CD versus 50 cents a floppy. In an experiment, Adobe is offering an upgrade to its Illustrator drawing software for $99 U.S. (CD only) or $139 (CD plus floppies). Some 85% of Adobe's customers have opted for the CD-only package. The goal, says Adobe VP of graphics and publishing products John Kunze, is to eliminate floppies altogether as a distribution medium for application software.
That would be a premature step, according to figures quoted by Yehiel Sobol, president of Kao Infosystems Canada Inc. in Arnprior, Ontario, which manufactures blank floppy discs for the retail market and duplicates commercial software on floppy and CD. In 1995, CD-ROM accounted for some 35% of Kao's software-dubbing market, but Sobol predicts a 50/50 split by the summer of 1996. It actually takes more time for Kao to gear up for mass production of a CD title-- up to eight hours of preproduction-- than for floppies, which require only 15 seconds to write data onto a blank floppy disc, which Kao keeps in a ready stockpile. But once past that eight-hour mastering stage, each duplicate CD can pop off the assembly line in five seconds compared to 20 seconds per floppy. With CD-ROM drives a standard feature of new computers, it's easy to overlook the fact that perhaps only 30% of all North American computers have CD drives, meaning that the endless floppy shuffle will be a feature of the computing experience for some years yet.