I have been reading the book Free by Chris Anderson. It is an interesting read that I would recommend. Like many good books there are some points that I agree with, and some that I disagree with but both parts made me think.
I think the biggest point that I disagree with is his willingness to make “close to 0″ and “exactly 0″ equivalent. In some situations the value of giving away something that is close to zero, or charging generally for “all you can eat” can work and does work, but it doesn’t work as a blanket statement. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his review of Free, the “close enough to free” bandwidth that YouTube uses is estimated to cost three hundred and sixty million dollars in 2009. And if the bandwidth use continues to grow even with the cost dropping it may not ever get to where it is truly 0, just the units we bother to measure are larger.
The other thing that has struck me in reading this book is that most of what is being discussed is nothing new, but the framing. Some of the free is shifted costs – like the “free gifts” that a vendor might give good customers. Some of it is free as in no money was exchanged, but in many of these transactions they are no different than a barter, or an exchange of value. Very little of what is discussed is free as in “given with no expectation of return.”
What I like about the book is that it has made many people think about what free might mean, and also about the value of things – both those given for free and for fee. It asks the reader to reframe how they look at value and returns. Sometimes the exchange is money. Sometimes it is value found in other ways, whether reputation, future favors, or even the impact on the world as a whole.
I did get to hear Chris Anderson speak on a panel at SXSW on Free, and the line that struck me the most was when talking about giving away Wired Magazine on the web for free his reasoning was that they “couldn’t afford to not be part of the discussion.” In other words – their “free magazine” was because keeping it only on paper was going to cost them down the road. But ultimately that free is paying them back in subscriptions and relevancy that they wouldn’t have had if they hadn’t re-evaluated where there costs and benefits were. It isn’t really just free – it is recognizing where you have to give to gain, and seeing what the value of each is.
