- Mailing costs - special packaging to protect is expensive.
- Fragile - get scratched - people don't carry them around because of this.
- Updating requires complete replacement expense - even if only a small piece of original content requires updating
- Maintaining a direct mail (postal mail list) is difficult - and results in 10-20% bad mail on average.
- No interactivity - no connection to the internet - no reporting of use.
- People use one time only at best.
- Notebooks will exceed desktops in 2008 for total distribution - that ship with even less CD drives installed. Gateway, for example, sees CD-RW drives go out with just under 20 percent of the notebooks it sells.
- In many corporate environments such as PCs used in call centers, the IT departments do not order PCs with CD drives to avoid users sticking in CDs with other uses - programs. However all PCs must have USB to support standard peripherals. (mouse, printers, monitors...)
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CDs are experiencing rapid decay as a means for communicating information. They are fragile, non-up datable, and most important - many computers lack CD drives to view them now. CDs are cheap to make compared to the expense of a flash drive, but expensive to mail. Moreover, even the slightest update of content requires a complete replacement and re mailing of the CD. Last, CDs are boring, users don't put them in, and even if they do - it's only one time and no reporting or interactivity is done. So, if you are doing training, there is no way to know if they played it or learned anything from it.
If you compared the use of a CD for training over time, the CD quickly becomes more expensive (at about 3 updates / mailings) compared to flash drive. More important, there is not interactive connection to know if this expense was ever used. It is a blind expense distribution method that surveys have revealed has a very low (5% or less) "take-rate".
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