Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, is following up The Long Tail with a book titledFREE, scheduled for release mid-2008. He gives us an interesting preview in this blog entry and in thisvideo.
Anderson’s analysis of free is well structured. He starts with an analysis of how waste is good – for instance, “waste” of computing cycles allowed computer programmers to develop the GUI. If processing power had never become plentiful, the computer might have never been democratized.
The latest abundance comes in the form of web 2.0 applications, which are being developed in unprecedented numbers and at very low cost. Often, these applications base most of their value on free storage. According to Anderson, in a digital economy when the cost of storage, development and bandwidth is next to nothing, you might as well charge nothing.
However, every abundance creates a new scarcity. The scarcities in the old economy were time and money. The new web 2.0 economy adds attention and reputation – thus signaling the importance of a clearly communicated brand and paying attention to your customers. The bottom-line message: don’t compete on price when the cost of the product is next to zero – compete on attention and reputation. Then, find a way to convert attention and reputation into money.
In fact, Anderson states, democratizing your product allows the world to discover it’s value. This “crowdsourced innovation” model is illustrated by the Honeywell home computer, which in 1965, cost the same as “about four new cars”. This was a single purpose computer, which existed solely to manage recipe cards.
When computers became democratized, people started using them for a variety of purposes. Anderson suspects that nobody uses them for recipe cards – and he’s probably right. So, a group of engineers made the wrong guess as to how people would use computers in their homes, but hundreds of millions of users figured it out, and are still innovating on daily basis.
What’s not completely clear in Anderson’s thesis is how anybody other than Google makes money from free. If he ever figures that out, I’m sure he’ll be the best selling author of all time.