Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price explores the forces behind the burgeoning free internet-based economy. Free operating systems and browsers, free email, free professional networking, free phone calls — how did we get here and where is it taking us?
He argues that the digital realm naturally pushes content towards a free, or virtually free price. One key factor in this migration is the concept of scarcity. For instance there is only so much shelf space in a bookstore, there is only so much physical room in U.S postal trucks, and if I give you a CD then I don’t have it to listen to. Once these things go digital we get the worlds biggest book store, email freely moving around the world, and digital copies created quickly, at little-to-no-cost and identical to the original. After I make the first digital book or musical recording, the production of the second one is almost free. Amortize the cost over each one produced and the more distributed the lower the per-unit cost until that cost gets so small as to be almost free.
The rapid advances in digital processing power, network speed and capacity, and digital storage are really fueling this revolution. What were once scarce resources are now so abundant that they can be wasted, and given away for free. In the days of 3 major television networks every hour of prime time scheduling was precious. Contrast that to YouTube with a relatively few good things to watch in a sea of garbage — but the storage and delivery is so cheap that it doesn’t matter. We no longer need to manage from a point of scarcity, with its top-down control, avoiding costly failures. In the new age of abundance we can afford bottom-up strategies, with lots of very cheap failures (i.e. the average YouTube video.) Recognizing this global shift is crucial to successfully managing in this new economy.
Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity
The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce. Consider another example: Wired’s IT department used to send out occasional emails telling employees it was time to “delete unneeded files from the shared folders”—their way of saying they had run out of storage room on the servers. Because we’re good corporate citizens, we all dutifully scanned through our files, deleting those we could live without. Perhaps you’ve done the same.
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RodeWorks » Blog Archive » Can paid content also have a ‘free’ version? on Jan 05 10 at 9:44 am[...] recently read Chris Anderson’s book on the emerging free business model, I found this question interesting — are we entitled to free? Most of the comments on the [...]
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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