kidmercury

killer post boss. thanks for putting the smackdown on the youngsters who don't see free as a marketing strategy, somebody needed to put those children in their place.

but i do have some issues with the way freemium is often presented. basically, the common argument is that you can use free as a marketing tool to sell premium services with more features. flickr is a prime example, they offer free accounts with X amount of storage and than paid accounts with more storage.

this obviously can make money and create a healthy and profitable business -- at least for now. ultimately, though, it's a crippleware strategy that relies on artificial scarcity. i also think it creates a mindset where free is viewed as a cost to sell premium services, rather than viewing it as the cost to earn trust to gain influence and private customer information. the latter is particularly important: once we have customer information, we can connect these customers and create personalized services. it is personalization and networking that are the truly disruptive forces freeconomics will unleash, in my opinion, and thus that is where i think most of us would be better off focusing.

google does free properly, in my opinion, and while my dislike for them is growing by the day i have to give props where props are due. by making it free to get indexed, google is able to access a wider data set and innovate by analyzing this data. and by making it free to search, and by making all sorts of free services (gmail, google reader, etc) google is positioning itself to know everything about you, so that it can best personalize the world for you, so that it can intermediate all of your commercial transactions. that in my opinion is freeconomics at its finest.

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