Contemplating Freedom

Reading through an article from Techdirt by Tim Lee involved this readwriteweb.com article. My thoughts are simple: free can turn a profit, learn how to use it. For years, consumers have been lured into deals that offer free products with the purchase a new car, a bedroom set, and whatever other fancy allure that might attract customers. These products are offered at no cost to boost the sale of their major products.

Of course, as we've seen with the RIAA, some industries do not know how to apply this to the Internet world. What some businesses do not understand is that scarce goods like physical objects can still sell while giving infinite goods like music or information the possibility to promote or lure consumers.

In the article, Alex Iskold makes some remarks on how Google offers their word processing and spreadsheet web applications for free thus destroying the market for desktop applications like Microsoft Office. This is completely wrong and a rude accusation. All markets especially software are expanding and having to evolve. The assumption that Microsoft hasn't evolved is false as well. Microsoft adapted to Google's offering of free word processing and spreadsheets by offering Office Live which allows use of their Office suite online though it may be a bit limited but syncs automatically with your desktop content. Another safe mention is that MS Office is very robust in it's processing power even more so than the Google counterpart. Google Docs can be very limiting however very useful in its own way. To say that offering it for free hinders Microsoft Office useless is gravely wrong. Not to mention, Google Docs is not the only online document suite out there. ThinkFree and Zoho have been in the business for a while and are just now being noticed. Zoho does not have piles of cash as Iskold suggest Google does (his reasoning behind the free-ness of Google being evil), and these apps have even more robust document suites than Google as well as more options than even a normal version of Microsoft Office. Once again, to suggest Google is evil for offering free services is wrong. Don't forget that Microsoft has many more "piles of cash" than Google, so I don't know why that's not an obvious thought. Businesses will have to adapt. It's called competition, Iskold!

Another point Iskold makes is of Google publishing free books. Books, no less, from libraries willing to allow digital scanning. If we can eliminate the use of libraries, we will be eliminating the taxes required to maintain these facilities. Of course, we all know this probably will not happen, but understand that digital information is an infinite good therefore you will never have to worry about trying to find a physical copy or even think about whether its checked out or not. The cost of maintaining this database is minimal at best.

Google pushing forward while others lag behind is hardly Google's fault. They understand a good business model on which it uses scarce goods and infinite goods together in happiness.

One more note, "Getting people to click on ads is still a rocket science on the web." Google realized a method behind this... relavent advertisments. People click through because it is relavent to what they are reading. It's obviously NOT rocket science.

Dangerous territory? Monopolistic practices? You're thoughts are deluded sir and further more, you need to research a little more before you start bashing a business model that embraces something that you think is dangerous.