Few things that the article missed. 1. Software products had a huge physical size. Sometimes a single application or development environment would have 3 to five kg of serious mass. You could get it much faster by going to a store than by ordering it and waiting for it to come in the mail. And ecommerce at a distance was a somewhat iffy thing in those days pre-2k when Egghead was bleeding, and the customers were divided about 50/50 between those who wanted to buy from startup geniuses operating in the garage in their skivvies, and those who wanted to deal with market leaders who spent so much on tech support that they were doomed. If you could go to a store and evaluate the tangible reality of a product, you could see that the product was actually shipping, and you might be able to guess whether or not the firm that created it had adult supervision. 2. Software-related salaries shot up pretty fast during the 1990's, so keeping a competent staff in retail became more and more difficult as the generation that knew how the toy computers worked got old enough to get full-time jobs. 3. People liked bringing home those boxes of software, many containing over 150 tangible items (manuals, diskettes in envelopes, warranty cards, advertising, coupons, mouse pads, reference cards, keyboard decorations and cheat sheets, free trials of other software, invites to join the loozer groups, dongles ...) until the time when our offices started overflowing with it all. Then we realized how little of it had any lasting value, and that they had to buy a new version of everything at least once a year. And spouses didn't like seeing all that bling piling up.