My daily readings 03/01/2008

Web Worker Daily » Archive David Allen Part 3: Really Getting it Done is Not Just Lists «  Annotated

tags: davidallen, gtd

Really Getting it Done is Not Just Lists

THE EXPECTATION ECONOMY

tags: no_tag

FREE LOVE

tags: business, free

The Danger of Free – ReadWriteWeb

tags: business, models

Beware of Freeconomics – ReadWriteWeb  Annotated

tags: business, patterns, web

The argument that it cost Google nothing to develop and offer GMail is wrong. Likely it costs millions of dollars each year.
The fact of the matter is that GMail was offered for free mostly because Google could afford it. This is a standard monopolistic
tactic used to enter a new market – drive the price down (in this case to $0) and kill off the competition. Yahoo! was actually first
to market and had a perfectly good product with a fair model: they offered a basic product for free and a premium product with more storage for a price. But when Google made its move, Yahoo! could not compete.

Perhaps the biggest worry of free are startups. To begin with, how do you compete with free? Suppose someone has
a great idea for improving web mail. Entering the market is really difficult. A lot of inertia is now behind Google and in the new world of freeconomics, you can no longer compete on price. Not that long ago the
concept of better and cheaper allowed startups to make the bet. But now that cheaper has been replaced with free,
that axis is shut out.

• Entrepreneurs just try to invent new communication ways. - post by joel

The downside of freeconomics is a monopolistic market, with barriers to entry,
and little incentive to innovate. In addition the middle-man and transactional complexities are the other side effects of this new economic trend.

Likewise, Flickr/Yahoo gives away free image space to attract 1) a huge community to which they can market stuff, 2) a massive volume of page views (i.e. ad revenue) based on user-generated content, and 3) a fantastic pool of tagged images that Yahoo can serve as search results.

In this freeconomics world, startups still have a chance because startup costs are rock-bottom low. However, it is not enough to build a “killer app”. They have to build a “killer honey pot” that uniquely attracts workers/customers that generate the content that both attracts page view “honey” and (virally) more workers/customers.

Is this bad or complex? Not really, just a different skillset. In this “honey pot” world, effective social architecture is more important than sheer quantity of application features. You don’t charge (or charge much) for the “application.” Instead, you harvest value out of the content/attention of your worker-bee customers.

It is unbalanced not to mention things like Google Apps and Google Search. Google follows the freemium model on many of its products: Google Apps is competing directly with Zoho. The google search appliance has many large corporate competitors. I am sure there are others. In this day and age, a free product can compete by being better. Larger companies will buy the user base, and shoulder the cost of “free.” Witness Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $2 billion; even though it already had Google Video, which was just as free. This is how it’s done.

One of the biggest problems that I have with the “free” argument, which you’ve mentioned in your article, is the whole idea of marginal costs of zero, or virtually zero. Generally speaking (and I can’t think of a good counter-example), the only way that you get to such low costs is through significant capital investment and mass production so that, over time, fixed costs are distributed over a huge volume of product.

Anything that’s mass produced, or mass distributed, still requires a rather large up front investment. That takes deep pockets, which many smaller companies don’t have. You’ve indicated this above in your comments about Gmail overpowering Yahoo Mail (although Hotmail is still around…?)