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Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free"
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
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The biggest point, in my opinion, that Gladwell makes, is that you still need to find a way to make money. Both sides use the example of youtube, which gives away everything for free. However, they have infrastructure costs of somewhere around $300 million a year, which they haven't been able to cover with advertising. Will they be able to find a way to cover their costs, or not? I don't know the answer to that, maybe eventually.
I think Anderson is kind of stumbling upon a point an MBA told me once, that given enough time, all new technology becomes a commodity. There are a dozen word processors you can choose from, a dozen different types computers, a dozen types of memory to choose from, hundreds of flash game sites (which are free, but 20 years ago people paid real money for games just like those). So for the most part, things will get sold for a little more than the cost to create them (the MBA then went on to tell me a number of different techniques to 'lock in' customers to your product: trapping users with file format was one, there were many other more devious methods, and Microsoft uses many of them. I don't underestimate quality MBAs anymore).
What Anderson is saying is that more and more, marketers will use freeness to suck users in. This is actually common knowledge among marketers, they've been playing with 'free' for years, and they are really excited about it, and talk about it amongst themselves, and to anyone else who will listen. Basically Anderson is right.
What Gladwell is saying is that you still need a way to cover your costs. Basically he is right as well.
They are both right, and what's more, if you asked an MBA about this, they might wonder why you are arguing about such basic ideas. And if you ask nicely, they'll tell you tons more about things you never even thought of.
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or my mother's / sister's definition:
summary (also summery), adj.: of or relating to the summer, esp. with clothes, e.g. yellow cotton dresses.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Political analyst Matthew Yglesias over at CAP has a fairly good take on both the book and the review at the CAP web site.
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To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
It's all so exciting! Wouldn't you agree?!
May the Maths Be with you!
My take is that Gladwell is post-peak and he knows it.
Give him a little bit of credit, at least try to address his arguments.
They're both rather accomplished bullshit-pop-sociology writers, but the real disagreement has a lot to do with their style. Anderson is like Tom Friedman and Ray Kurtzweil, in that he is a messianic This Is The Future pop philosopher-type, and tends to construct his argument around absolute, theoretical propositions, and asserts his case as if it were inescapable physical law. He writes like an Austrian Economist or a Straussian. He is a structuralist.
Gladwell is the skeptic. All of his books have mainly focused on picking-apart the assumptions of structuralists; you think entrepreneurs are the movers in an economy, he puts up 10 reasons why it isn't so simple. You think hockey teams always select the best roster of players? Outliers is about how social institutions are highly irrational in identifying the successful. You think people make rational decisions at all? He wrote a book called Blink where he calls it all into question.
I'm not saying he's right, it's just his MO. When he sees a book like Free, that makes Big Important Statements about How All Of Us Order Our Lives, it's bait to someone like him.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.