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Forbes Ventures Bold Predictions For IT, Linux
LinuxThis writes "Everyone's favorite, Daniel Lyons and other Forbes journalists have made some bold predictions about IT in 2004. Interesting quotes include 'Microsoft warms up to open source, and tries to make a buck off it', and the best, from our main man Daniel Lyons himself: 'The end of 'free'. Free didn't work for dotcom pet food stores, yet much of the rhetoric around technologies like Linux and voiceover-IP still involves this crazy notion that companies can make money by giving things away. They can't.' Even better, he suggests: 'SCO Group will settle its lawsuit against IBM. Both sides will declare victory. The Linux community will turn on IBM.' This is interesting considering his previous observations about OSS.."
...to anyone, technie or luddite alike, that IBM has a vested interest in seeing this lawsuit through to the end and making sure SCO is crushed into a fine-grained dust.
Yes, it would probably be cheaper for them to stop short. But that's kind of like negotiating with people who take hostages - you do it once, and it encourages others. Which is why this one is going all the way to the end, and IBM will not settle for anything less than complete victory.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It is possible to make money giving stuff away for free, but you have to be very precise about how you do it. You just need to give out enough of your product to make the public want the stuff you need to pay for. A good example of this is the IRL company 'Primerica'. They're a financial managment service that gives out financial evaluations for free. That is, they will take what you make, how much you want to retire off of, how much debt you have, etc and figure out a way to make everything managable and possible. However, they make money off debt consolidation so you can pay off your bills faster, insurance, etc. You go in, get everything sorted for free, and then hopefully you'll get your loans and such from them. They're making a very large profit from this strategy, from what I can tell. Another good example is a band who releases low-bitrate MP3s for download off their website. You get the songs and can tell if you like them or not. However, if you want the versions that don't sound poor with all the case artwork and such then you'll buy the CD.(This is what got me to buy both of Rilo Kiley's CDs.) I've noticed that the reason a lot of these companies fail at selling stuff by giving other stuff away is because they give out the wrong stuff for free. It's like crack - give them just enough to give them the need for your product and you're set. Kinda like Google's expert search. Can search google for free, but if you need help finding that one obscure thing then you can pay to have others with a lot more experience do it for you. I'm rambling. Damn, do I love coffee.
Why is everyone so afraid of the concept of anything being 'free'? Is it that radical of a proposition that a broad-based community can create and support an infrastructure without the need for it to turn into a for-profit corporation? Community WLANs, VoIP, Open Source projects....aren't these things all technologically and socially proven by now? All of these analysts and experts can't be that shackled to the bottom line, can they? Paradigm shift, anyone....
The method of forecasting by asking a few people what they think is going to happen is called the Delphi Method It is, in my opinion one of the overall weakest methods by far, and especially if the views are collected the way Forbes has done. In normal practice the initial and raw opinions are improved by feedback to the group for more refinement, which obviously has not happened in the Forbes article - hence, the almost idiotic "predictions."
And as you rightly said, these people don't have the faintest clue as to what is happening. Their job is to get paychecks by telling their clients what they want to hear ... and they will keep on telling it ... Henry Blodgett anyone ?
There are tons of other methods to do Technological Forecasting, (an article that I wrote many years ago) and I wish some more work that has more solid basis is presented for Tech Forecasting at /. We deserve better "predictions" than this ....
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies