The usual state of affairs is for things to keep getting more expensive. That increase can be driven by a number of factors: scarcity, design, materials and even perception all play a part. But it's just as common these days for prices to head in the opposite direction. Especially for items which have become commodities, such as clothing basics or housewares or office supplies, advances in production techniques have streamlined manufacturing so that it can cost less to make an item than ever before. Where it used to take a person sitting at a bench days to make a single pair of shoes, today a factory can churn out hundreds or even thousands an hour. Couple that with cheap labor in Vietnam or China or Malaysia, and a pair of wearable running kicks can be had for less than the price of lunch.
That's the physical world. Move over to the electronic one and the change is even more profound. It may take a person or team of people hours and hours to code a game for your phone where you get points for collecting cats. But once it exists, copies can be made for next to nothing. Other than distribution and marketing, the actual cost of replicating the final product is effectively zero. In his book "Free: The Future Of A Radical Price" author Chris Anderson put it this way: "In the atoms economy, which is to say most of the stuff around us, things tend to get more expensive over time. But in the bits economy, which is the online world, things get cheaper. The atoms economy is inflationary, while the bits economy is deflationary."
Indeed, in that deflationary spiral, the ultimate stop is "free." In fact, we've not only come to accept it but assume it. In spite of the tremendous investment in time and/or money it takes to get to that point, once we're online we have come to expect that it costs nothing to be a part of that world. Information? Wikipedia is there for the taking. Communication? Google, Yahoo and AOL all provide options. Travel, weather, friends? TripAdvisor, Weather Channel, Facebook. Just this past week most of the major online brokers, and even some brick and mortar players, lowered their price to trade stocks and their ilk to nothing. Charlie Merrill may have brought Wall Street to Main Street, but Charles Schwab brought it to Gmail.
Of course, free is not really free. The model is to give something away, and then charge for something adjacent. The orchard has cider, but you have to buy the cup. The razor handle costs you nothing, but you need to purchase the blades. Go to many bars at happy hour, and the snacks they put out are on the house. That said, whoever is cooking in the kitchen uses a lot of salt. Hey, can I buy you a drink?
In the online model, the equation above is slightly flipped: they don't charge you outright, but rather you give them something of value for nothing. In this case, that adjacent thing is your personal and browsing data. When you sign on or sign up, you give the firm your okey-dokey to watch and track and aggregate all you do for their own purposes. You grant them permission to monetize your activities at no charge to them. Yes, they do ask if it's OK, in the form of a dense legalese posting you have to click on before you can enter their gates. But click we do, usually without a moment of hesitation, and into the fun house we go. And so we can't blame them for doing exactly what they say they will do: making money off of our electronic souls.
Like addicts hooked on heroin, there's almost no chance we can kick the habit. Pay for Facebook? Be charged for email? Pony up for the weather? Free traffic info has become an inalienable right of the internet age: you can have my Waze if you pry it from my cold dead fingers. It recalls another thing we hear more and more: Big Government, get out of my life, but don't you lay a finger on my Medicare. It's a devil's bargain to be sure, but one into which we willingly enter. So the question is this: free at what cost?
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Marc Wollin of Bedford uses many free services. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
That's the physical world. Move over to the electronic one and the change is even more profound. It may take a person or team of people hours and hours to code a game for your phone where you get points for collecting cats. But once it exists, copies can be made for next to nothing. Other than distribution and marketing, the actual cost of replicating the final product is effectively zero. In his book "Free: The Future Of A Radical Price" author Chris Anderson put it this way: "In the atoms economy, which is to say most of the stuff around us, things tend to get more expensive over time. But in the bits economy, which is the online world, things get cheaper. The atoms economy is inflationary, while the bits economy is deflationary."
Indeed, in that deflationary spiral, the ultimate stop is "free." In fact, we've not only come to accept it but assume it. In spite of the tremendous investment in time and/or money it takes to get to that point, once we're online we have come to expect that it costs nothing to be a part of that world. Information? Wikipedia is there for the taking. Communication? Google, Yahoo and AOL all provide options. Travel, weather, friends? TripAdvisor, Weather Channel, Facebook. Just this past week most of the major online brokers, and even some brick and mortar players, lowered their price to trade stocks and their ilk to nothing. Charlie Merrill may have brought Wall Street to Main Street, but Charles Schwab brought it to Gmail.
Of course, free is not really free. The model is to give something away, and then charge for something adjacent. The orchard has cider, but you have to buy the cup. The razor handle costs you nothing, but you need to purchase the blades. Go to many bars at happy hour, and the snacks they put out are on the house. That said, whoever is cooking in the kitchen uses a lot of salt. Hey, can I buy you a drink?
In the online model, the equation above is slightly flipped: they don't charge you outright, but rather you give them something of value for nothing. In this case, that adjacent thing is your personal and browsing data. When you sign on or sign up, you give the firm your okey-dokey to watch and track and aggregate all you do for their own purposes. You grant them permission to monetize your activities at no charge to them. Yes, they do ask if it's OK, in the form of a dense legalese posting you have to click on before you can enter their gates. But click we do, usually without a moment of hesitation, and into the fun house we go. And so we can't blame them for doing exactly what they say they will do: making money off of our electronic souls.
Like addicts hooked on heroin, there's almost no chance we can kick the habit. Pay for Facebook? Be charged for email? Pony up for the weather? Free traffic info has become an inalienable right of the internet age: you can have my Waze if you pry it from my cold dead fingers. It recalls another thing we hear more and more: Big Government, get out of my life, but don't you lay a finger on my Medicare. It's a devil's bargain to be sure, but one into which we willingly enter. So the question is this: free at what cost?
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford uses many free services. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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