Tag: business

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Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired.

I don’t expect that to draw you in for a very exciting post. What I do want to share with you is that he believes that the future of commerce and business, especially over the Internet, is in giving things away for free. An article about this very subject was the cover story in Wired about a year ago, and Anderson is writing a book that will be out in July called, simply, Free.

Pay attention to this one, because it’s possibly very revolutionary and is likely to turn some heads. He thinks you should be giving stuff away in order to make money.

He’s not necessarily talking about the Gilette model, either:

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

As examples, he mentions that after experimenting with paid content, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are now free to read on the Web (excepting some information in WSJ). At the time of this writing, I can even browse NYT on my iPod touch, using an application they wrote that is also free to download.

Continue reading “Something for Nothing Can Make You Something”

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Are eBook prices edging a little too high for people’s comfort? Josh Quittner writes in Time:

If only the Kindle 2 were cheaper! Despite its other shortcomings, Amazon’s new and improved digital-book reading device does enough right that it could become the Model T of e-readers, capturing the imagination–and discretionary spending–of the masses. But in this wretched economy, in which most of us will purchase only nonessentials that save us money or make us money, I doubt folks will pony up $359 for a pleasure-reading gadget. And thanks to Amazon’s mysterious pricing policies, the old argument–that digital books are so much cheaper than their hide-bound ancestors–no longer holds.

Before a recent visit to my dear old mum, I purchased The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, a 992-page Nazi-palooza that, given the nearly 3-lb. weight of the new English translation, makes for an ideal Kindle selection. But when I got ready to buy it on Amazon, I blanched at the $16.19 price. Every Kindle text I’ve purchased since Amazon started selling the device in November 2007 has been $9.99. Indeed, that was one of the Kindle’s main draws: you could buy books wirelessly, on demand and at a fraction of the cost of their printed peers. Case in point: Littell’s book was listed in Amazon’s Kindle store with a hardcover price of $29.99, making the digital version seem like a real bargain. But later I discovered that Amazon’s bookstore was selling the new hardcover for $17.99. So the Kindle saved me all of $1.80. Big whoop.

Customers aren’t stupid. They realize that an eBook like that on the Kindle or on other electronic bookstores doesn’t cost as much to print, warehouse, or to distribute—because those things don’t cost anything. Quittner himself writes about an “old argument” that “digital books are… cheaper” than print pieces. A lot of people are used to purchasing a large portion of their books at the $9.99 price point on Kindle, because that’s an automatic discount applied to both new titles and to titles on the NYT bestseller list.

What shows the intelligence of the customer is that I don’t recall any publisher ever saying in public that eBooks would be less expensive than print ones. Amazon makes a big to-do about the $9.99 price point, enough so that Quittner believes in his article that Amazon is also the one who set the list price for the book he was trying to buy. (This is not true; list prices are set by publishers; Amazon decides what the sale price is, at least when it comes to Kindle titles. I don’t know how the print side of things works.) Customers are intuiting that digital books should not cost as much as print ones.

I ran into this myself just a few days ago. Now having the Kindle app for iPhone, I went to look at a few books to see if I wanted to buy anything. I landed on a book that in print is a mass market paperback. Its Kindle price? $7.99—identical to the pricing of the hard copy version. I don’t think I need to write long on how quickly that decision was made for me.

Companies—and this is not limited to publishers—are underestimating the human desire to own physical objects. To many people (and at least to me), physical ownership of a piece of property, such as a DVD on which a video game is coded, or a stack of paper on which words are printed, is more valuable than a collection of bits that make up even a functionally equivalent electronic version of the same product. In addition, I have more control over the physical piece of property, especially when DRM enters the picture on electronic files and I’m being told what I can and can’t do with it.

What do you think? When you have a choice, which one would you buy? Would you buy both? What do you expect to pay for it?

Discuss, and feel free to answer the poll in the sidebar.

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From Harvard Business comes a piece by Cory Doctorow:

Contemporary corporate IT’s top job is locking down the PC and the network, blocking users from installing their own apps, blocking them from accessing forbidden websites (nominally this is about blocking porn, but a dismaying number of workplaces also block IM, webmail, blogs, message-boards, and social networking services where employees might otherwise find useful, low-cost coordination with other employees, suppliers and customers), and spying on their every click and keystroke to capture the occasional bad egg who’s saying or doing something that could put the whole firm at risk.

Well, yeah, because the default in this kind of situation is just not to trust anyone. When I read this paragraph, I said to myself something like: “I suppose that’s because corporate IT departments lag behind their end users on most of these things.”

Then, of course, I read on:

The dirty secret of corporate IT is that its primary mission is to serve yesterday’s technology needs, even if that means strangling tomorrow’s technology solutions. The myth of corporate IT is that it alone possesses the wisdom to decide which technologies will allow the workers on the front line to work better, faster and smarter — albeit with the occasional lackluster requirements-gathering process, if you’re lucky.

The fact is that the most dreadful violators of corporate policy — the ones getting that critical file to a supplier using Gmail because the corporate mail won’t allow the attachment, the ones using IM to contact a vacationing colleague to find out how to handle a sticky situation, the incorrigible Twitterer who wants to sign up all his colleagues as followers through the work day — are also the most enthusiastic users of technology, the ones most apt to come up with the next out-of-left-field efficiency for the firm.

I would venture a guess that if you polled IT workers within most companies, and then polled the people in the building who actually do the jobs that require using technology within that environment, and asked them both what tools they needed/wanted in order to perform their jobs efficiently, you would receive very different answers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not for complete anarchy when it comes to installing applications or using network resources. Installing applications leads to support visits and lost productivity in some cases (from awesome Windows-related conflicts, usually). Too much utilization of network resources can be a bad thing. But the default method of behavior should be to trust that people you have hired to do a job will efficiently perform that job, regardless of whether or not they have an IM window open during the day or Twitter occasionally or read/write blogs or what-have-you. Job performance can be measured in ways other than “let’s see what [name] has been looking at on the Internet today.”

You know—in ways like “did you get the job done” ways.

People don’t get to be comfortable with technologies and methods of communication if you don’t allow them to use them and flex their technological muscles.

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Michael Hyatt tells a story of meeting with another publishing CEO regarding blogging:

He asked, “How do I get started blogging?” My heart lept (sic). I knew he would have an instant audience. I, for one, would love to read what he had to say. I imagined all kinds of things I could learn from him.

Then he dashed my hopes. “Who do you use to ghost write your blog?” he asked.“Excuse me?” I choked.

“I mean, who do you use to write your blog? Could I possibly hire him or could you recommend someone that is really good?”

Honestly, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The guy obviously did not get it. I blurted out, “I don’t use a ghost writer. I write every word myself.”

He then said, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that. I don’t have the time.”

Without thinking, I said, “Then you shouldn’t do it at all.”

The worst thing you can do with blogging or Twitter or social networking of any kind is to set it up and then make someone else do all the work for you (the second-worst is to begin something and then let it lay fallow). Engaging with people on the Internet and within social media spheres is about making personal connections, not about being a company mouthpiece. Read through Mike’s quote up above: he recounts his anticipation of another CEO from a large publisher actively blogging about what he finds interesting and what he can share about the industry and his unique position.

He’s then very disappointed at the impersonality of his peer’s request. Why? Because he was looking to make a connection. To learn and grow within the industry by reading what someone else has to say—and to engage in conversation.

Continue reading “We Need Blogging Ghostbusters”

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From David of 37signals:

Popular perception holds that companies must always be growing or they’re dying. There’s either up or down, win or lose, success or failure. I think that’s a harmful dichotomy that leads to the death of perfectly viable companies in their quest for constant growth.

Not all companies are meant to have thousands of employees or a billion-dollar market cap. Some companies are meant to be just 10 people or 5 people or just one guy. That’s what their product, niche, or technique is capable of sustaining and there’s absolutely no shame in that. Finding your natural size should be a triumph, not a capitulation.

These are wise words, but then again, 37signals operates a touch ahead of the curve from everyone else. He has a point that good companies have a critical mass point, where they provide something niche that no one else is willing or equipped to provide, and they find meaning in being at that point, generating good revenue, and fulfilling their niche without worrying about numbers going up, only that the books are coming out well.

It’s been said before that companies focusing on pure profitability instead of marketshare as a primary goal will actually gain marketshare faster. I think that meshes well with David’s notion of company size.

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Normally, I would just have included a link in my daily del.icio.us posting to this article at GigaOm that somehow references part of a review that’s behind a pay wall at another site (I’m not sure I understand it myself), but I wanted to take the time to comment on some of the quotes pulled from the interview, because I think much of what is said is thumbs-up awesome.

For those of you who don’t know, Brad Bird is a director at Pixar. His first movie at Pixar was The Incredibles, which is my personal vote as the best piece of animation that company has ever produced.

(Actually, there are a lot of things to be said about the corporate culture—or lack thereof—at Pixar, and what that means for fostering creativity, but that’s a story for another evening.)

Keep reading for some quotes and my thoughts.

Continue reading “He’s Looking to Steal My “Captain Obvious” Title”

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“A managed environment requires behavior from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really mandatory only because it is mandated. We call it ‘professionalism.’ . . .

“Managed businesses have taken our voices. We want to struggle against this. We wear a snarky expression behind our boss’s back, place ironic distance between our company and ourselves, and we don’t want to think we have become our parents. But we have. And we’ve done so willingly.”–David Weinberger