Having Read the Wired Article, More Thoughts on Free and the Future of Business

Been reading Chris Anderson’s posts on his blog discussing his upcoming book on Free. I wrote recently about this and now have read his 6,000 word article in the most recent Wired and have more thoughts that I need to work through and find some time to put into a post. Until then, a preview.

Anderson looks at free services as the future of business. Perhaps a semantic nag, but I think this is more about business being OPEN.

More on this soon.

The Power of Free

Chris Anderson is and will be talking a lot about the power of “Free.” Open source software has been doing this for a long time and there are more and more examples of how this tactic will drive sales. Radiohead recently gave away their latest album (highly recommend if you don’t have it…) and then put it up for sale. Free certainly helped sales (you could pay what you wanted to for the download) when the album went to #1 in January 2008 after being in market for almost 2 months.

The latest example of this comes from Suze Orman and Oprah. Chris Anderson’s blog discusses it here. Most interesting is this chart:

Know that virtually every industry that sells goods or entertainment are watching this. Hoping that over protective brands (Major League Baseball, TV Production Studios, etc) reconsider their position.