First, a little confession.
While this story pretends to be about things becoming free, that’s only in the sense of free samples; buy one, get one free; bare bones for free in hopes of selling the deluxe version; free but with advertising. You know the drill.
But now free is the new black — chic, essential, even sexy.
A few years into this young century, every mouse click makes clearer that some things will be free whether the folks who produce them want to give them away or not.
Music. Software. Books. Or, for instance, this article (at least on the Web).
Some marketplace analysts — most prominently Chris Anderson in his latest book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" — suggest that even as digital technology and the Internet shrink the price of many forms of work to free, free can also offer a new way to turn a buck.
:People are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the concept of $0.00," writes Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine.
:It’s driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero," he writes. (The digital version of his book is free. The bound version will set you back $26.99.) "This new form of free is based on the economics of bits, not atoms. … The bits economy is deflationary."
Read the complete story at kansascity.com
At the heart of his argument is one of the most reliable adages of the Digital Age: The time-tested Moore’s Law that accurately predicted that the cost of computer processing will drop by half at least every two years.
That means computer processing, bandwidth, data storage and, Anderson argues, anything “made of ideas” becomes ever cheaper. So inexpensive — a single transistor in 1961 cost $10, enough to buy almost 2 million transistors today — that he thinks we might as well “round down to zero.” Or free.
Google and Microsoft, the rival giants birthed by the computer processor, seem at war over who can give away the most: operating systems, Web browsers, office software, e-mail, Internet searches. The one that gets people to take the most freebies could dominate your desktop.
To be sure, free is to the digital universe what water is to restaurants.
