Motherboard has an interesting look at the somewhat surprising survival of physical software in shrink-wrapped boxes, which continues to account for roughly a third of software sales.

This is true even though in most cases the boxes contain little or nothing.

Most of these physical packages are virtually empty, with only a tiny piece of paper inside with a download link and an activation code. Companies who sell software this way (say) that including a DVD is often a useless endeavor, as new laptops lack optical drives. Even when companies do sell physical media, users would still need to download the latest version of the software, as opposed to the one that’s on the optical disk.

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