Getting the "Free" Business Model Wrong Doesn't Mean the Model is Flawed

While "free" seems to be an increasingly popular business model, there are quite a few people who seem to be completely bungling what to do with "free" and then complaining when it doesn't work. Techdirt takes a look at some of the arguments surrounding why free as a business model may or may not work and why many of these arguments, while prevalent, just don't hold water. "you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good. No one is saying that everything needs to be free -- they're saying that infinite goods will be free, because of it's very nature in economics. In fact, Poole's argument is particularly weak when it comes to programmers, because most programmers don't earn any kind of royalties for the software they write. They are paid a salary, for their time -- but not for the software itself (which is an infinite good). And, I won't even get into the number of programmers who work on open source projects for free ... or the fact that Poole is blogging for free ..."

Comments

Re:I laugh

[tsm_sf]

For the MS support experience in a nutshell, google John Belushi's Ma Bell sketch from the early days of SNL.

Re:I laugh

[tsm_sf]

Bell can't be accused of doing everything wrong. Far from it. The reliability and durability of their hardware was never an issue. You could beat a man to death with a Bell handset. Their main problem, from a general customer's point of view, was that if you needed customer service you could go fuck yourself as far as they were concerned.