I have been intrigued by the back and forth between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Cuban on the topic of “Free” as a strategy and business model. … Here is where I come down on all of this. First and foremost, Free is a disruptive force. This does not mean that if you deploy a free business model you will be successful.
As he kicked off the Wired Business Conference on Monday, Wired magazine’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, started talking about Jell-O.
Shopping on cellphones–long a dream among e-commerce companies–is not yet a mass-market phenomenon. But some new tools could help change that picture.
A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free-versus-pay online are ending. In 2007 the New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. … The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
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