OEM, or Original Equipment Manufacturer, software is completely electronic, there are no manuals or retail boxes to manufacture and distribute - All you recieve is the CD-ROM of the software. Instead of receiving a hard copy book of the instructions on how to run the program, the entire manual is installed onto your computer during the software's installation process. Your electronic manual stored in the "Help" section, just as you see along the top bar of the Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator browser you are using right now. It has a complete index, searchable index, and sections that you can print out. The help menus have gotten so good that customers who have purchased the software with manuals, end up hardly using them.
OEM products, as you have probably heard, were established so that hardware manufacturers can bundle software with the hardware that they are selling at a discount. Most of these hardware manufacturers are under contract with the software manufacturers so they can't sell them to retail customers without hardware. We search out OEM Software through the secondary markets, such as surplus from hardware manufacturers or distributors with surplus OEM software and buys them in bulk from them. Then we are able to sell them without hardware because we are not under the same contracts as the hardware manufacturers are because we do not buy the OEM software directly from the software manufacturers. This is another great money saving feature that we have found and are able to pass on to our customers.