Chris Anderson’s new book: Online should be free; Thanks for the tip, Chris I’ll wait till your book is on the warez circuit
By Tarry Singh at 16 July, 2009, 9:52 am
Well I do get Anderson’s point though, while I was the foolish one back in the early 2000/late 90s to buy every piece of software, I was laughed at by my IT colleagues who had just about everything running for free. e-books, Exam books, Movies, Songs etc. I also agree that folks should get smarter and learn new and smarter ways to glue the consumers to their products. don’t give it all, give something away, not all of it.
What I don’t agree is that many folks don’t realize that distributing and downloading stuff is criminal and you just have to wait a while till the long digital hands of the laws will come and check everything on your computer. This will happen and then you will end up in some kind of rut to give back a small portion of your lifelong earnings — on monthly basis — to the software alliance.
Deal with the online industry is very addictive, first you get to lure them all for free and then lock them in or out, either way they’re stuck. Or you can do stuff legit, not download all the jailbreak hacks and just pay a small premium for stuff like buying from online stores like that of Apple or others.
The first thing I did after finishing Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” was pull out my checkbook and calculate how much I’ve been squandering in the online world.
Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, makes a big fuss about a new business model that has everything from video games to movies to newspapers getting peddled for an alluring price — zero. I figured I’d better be sure I wasn’t paying for downloadable stuff that’s being given away.
By Anderson’s paradigm, I turn out to be an information- age chump. I write checks to T-Mobile for my BlackBerry; to Comcast for cable TV, Internet and digital phone service (the latter is terrible, but they sure do have friendly repair folks); to two newspapers I read on my Kindle.
In a digital economy, processing, storage and bandwidth are cheaper than dirt, the author writes, so businesses that trade in things digital had better get smart about giving away some products while casting about for profits elsewhere. They can’t, after all, rely on a glut of easy targets like me.
They can, however, take the stuff I produce, along with the creations of musicians and other “content providers” and give it away.
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