Amazon launches software downloads
Online retailer Amazon has launched a software download section. And when we say launched, we mean, they've built a software downloader application which you can currently use to download a handful of products from TurboTax.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon has spent the second half of 2007 assembling a digital-delivery stack piece by piece: video through Unbox, including direct Unbox-to-TiVo ordering added that July, then a first-mover win over Apple with DRM-free Warner Music downloads in late December. The new software download section extends the same playbook to a category still dominated by shrink-wrapped boxes.
The launch itself is deliberately small — a standalone downloader application carrying only a handful of TurboTax titles — but the timing matters: tax season puts Intuit's product in front of exactly the mainstream buyers Amazon needs to habituate to buying software as a file rather than a disc.
First-order effects
- TurboTax buyers can now purchase and install directly from Amazon without waiting for shipping or visiting a store, giving Intuit a second major online channel alongside its own site during peak tax season.
- Amazon's downloader application, not the web store, becomes the required client — meaning Amazon controls the install experience and owns the customer relationship for every download sold.
Second-order effects
- Other consumer-software publishers face pressure to list titles in the store before the catalog fills with rivals, since a thin TurboTax-only shelf gives Intuit outsized visibility at no extra cost.
- Retailers and box-software distributors lose one more argument for physical inventory as Amazon applies its pricing and convenience machine to a category it previously shipped in cardboard.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across video, music, and now software, Amazon is positioning itself as the default checkout for all digital goods — a storefront role that shifts power from software publishers' own e-commerce toward whoever aggregates the demand.
- The downloader-client model also prefigures platform lock-in questions regulators and publishers would eventually have to weigh when a single retailer controls both discovery and delivery of consumer software.
The trend: Amazon is methodically converting itself from a shipper of physical media into a general-purpose digital storefront, category by category, using the same downloader-plus-catalog template each time.