When Microsoft released the eagerly awaited Xbox 360 game Halo 3 last month, fans waited through the night outside stores to get their hands on the first copies. How much more convenient it would have been if the game had simply arrived on their computers as soon as it was released. “If we had a delivery service, we could deliver the content electronically and maybe offer a discount,” says Jin Li of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.
Unfortunately that wasn’t possible. Microsoft’s connections to the internet would have been overwhelmed had they needed to send out more than a million…
