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Excessive Tech Packaging?
fraew wonders: "I just received a Microsoft Partner Program package in the usual MSDN sized box (34cm x 25cm x 11cm) that contained a single A5 piece of paper. Nothing more. Previously I've had RAM DIMMs and PCI cards double-boxed in boxes that approached the size of a computer case, so what is the worst example of excessive tech packaging you've received?"
Bought a tiny home firewall online. About 15cm x 10cm x 3cm (6in x 4in x 1in for the metrically impaired).
First the firewall was bubble wrapped. OK. Then the bubble wrap had a cardboard support. Fine. Then the OEM box box - this is where it starts to get crazy. That was easily 40cm x 20cm x 10cm. It was shrink wrapped, and then wrapped in another layour of bubble wrap by the reseller, and packed with scrunched up newspaper. It was then put in another box which must have been about 60cm x 40cm x 20cm. All of which was taped up and put inside a courier bag.
Now I'm not keen on damaged mail order goods, but that is just getting silly.
Being that I am currently writing a book on the topic, I feel qualified to say this 1 acre of hemp will produce up to 3 times as much paper pulp as 1 acre of timber On top of that you get up to 4 yields a year when it is 7 years for 1 yield of timber..So lets do the math Lets say 1 acre produces 100 sheets of paper for timber, over 7 years that is 14.2 sheets of paper per acre per year on timber 1 acre of hemp will produce 300 sheets of paper, 4 times a year which is 1200 sheets of peper per acre per year timber=14.2 hemp=1200 which one would you decide to grow?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
HP and Insight paired up to give us a good one. We ordered from Insight the "Advanced Pack" for HPs integrated Lights Out (iLO) feature on a Proliant server. This was several years ago when they had just started including the "basic" iLO for free on all their servers.
We recieved from Insight a box about 3/4 the size of a standard tower computer box. We opened it up to find a box the size you'd expect to find a full-sized array controller card in, plus a few large shipping air-bladders.
We opened up the array-controller sized box to find foam egg crate packaging securing what looked like a cd sleeve.
We opened up the CD sleeve to find inside the front cover, a number. We then used that number to "unlock" the "advanced features" that had really been there all the time.
The thing that I think makes this packaging especially over the top is that the number could have just as easily been put in a plain text email. "Shipping" and "packaging" were not even necessary to get this into our hands. We would have gotten it faster, cheaper and it would have cost them less to do it.
After all that, I'm afraid to say it actually got a little worse. The truth is, we didn't really order just one of them; we ordered three. All came packaged exactly the same way. Insight didn't make any effort to consolidate the smaller boxes into just one of the larger ones.
TW
My father, a medical statistician, was one of the authors of a book on skeletal maturity http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0702025119/ref=sr _11_1/002-0416510-2702407?ie=UTF8. I was asked to provide a program to accompany the book so that paedeatricians wouldn't need to do the complex maths that goes from measuring x-rays to assessing growth. This was a simple VC++ routine which came to less than 200Kb. The publishers insisted that it should be on a CD, not a floppy, because
- They were geared up to use CDs
- The end users couldn't be guaranteed to have a floppy drive available
So, in packaging terms the space wastage was enormous, but in marketing terms it was the sensible decision.init 11 - for when you need that edge.