In 1961, a single transistor cost $10. Today, Intel’s latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor – which is so cheap that basically a transistor is free.
Chris Anderson, the Wired Magazine Editor best known for The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
There has been some early controversy with its publication – charges that he plagiarized from Wikipedia. (“Is that even possible?” I hear some some young person asking.) And not all reviewers have loved it ( Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker , for example), but I find the ideas really interesting.
On my “work-related” blog, I have been writing occasionally about what is sometimes called “open everything.” That idea comes from a newly emerging open source approach to many things besides software.
If you have a free mindset, you start to see free all around you – ads for a free weekend getaway, free parking, free samples, free downloads.
My sons were born in the mid-1980s, so they are pretty much the Net Generation that grew up on a free Web that offered lots of free content legally and led them to lots of illegal/free content.
But they are out of college and in the work world now, and I have been wondering for a few years what their generation will think of “freeconomics” (not to be confused with freakonomics) when THEY are the business people using it to market or having it used against them to kill their business model.
There are good business models that use it. The book includes classics like Gillette’s idea of giving away free razors and making the profit on selling the blades. That idea lives on with free (with a computer purchase) or very cheap printers that sell those expensive cartridges.
I wrote about this last year when The New York Times went to free online. Now they are surveying users to see if they would be willing to pay for the news. Not a good backstep, I would say.
Chris Anderson argues that while free was once a marketing gimmick it “has emerged as a full-fledged economy.”
If you look at all those Google free services (search, Gmail, maps, documents, web pages, Picasa for photos, the Chrome browser), you could wonder why they would give it all away – but then you know that Google is a very successful money-making company, so it must work.
This blog is a free service from WordPress and its weekday companion blog is a freebie from Google.
Then you have free services, like the photo site Flickr, that do offer a premium version for a cost, but can’t seem to make money at it. How do you make money by giving things away?
Think about what Wikipedia did to the encyclopedia/reference book market (and to students doing “research”). Craig’s List basically took down print newspapers by changing classified ads.
When Chris Anderson wrote the original article in Wired that led to his new book, he ended with this thought experiment:
“In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be “too cheap to meter.” Needless to say, that didn’t happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he’d been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free?“
Would we have made everything electric? Electric cars, all electric home heating? Well, why would we have continued with expensive fossil fuels? What would OPEC have done with their oil supply glut then? 99 cents a gallon gas? All electric changes global warming too.
Well, it didn’t happen with energy, but it might happen with digital technologies moving towards free.
Outside Reading
- “How To Make Money Around Free Content”
- mediabusinessmodels.com
- Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
- Kevin Kellyt the vKevin Kelly’s talk at TED on “How does technology evolve? Like we did.”
- Kelly’s blog Cool Tools that looks at tech stuff
- New Rules For The New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World,
A while back I came across this website that is edited by Jason Bittner called 
is the co-creator of FOUND Magazine and an interesting photo book about LaPorte, Indiana. He also put together 
which is a collection of stories, essays, art, and other contributions by various artists, musicians, and writers. It’s the story of the role of the mixtape that was especially big in the late 1970s and 80s when cassette tape reigned.
by Thurston Moore . He is a founding member of the rock group 
begins with song titles from their mixes.
? Jack Nicholson’s character makes careful 
and the great 
(and even the 
).
As parents, our “little theologians and philosophers” often ask us really difficult questions about life and the universe – questions that we may not have answered for ourselves.
, when it came out in 1993. It’s a strange novel which imagines what Einstein may have been dreaming about in Bern, Switzerland before he published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.
I wanted to build a time machine
. I probably read the Classics Illustrated comics version of the novel before I read the novel. I had boxes of discarded electronics and machines in my basement that I had culled on garbage collection days. I loved playing with the gears, knobs and circuit boards. I learned some things along the way, got some nasty shocks and burned myself on my soldering iron, but I never did get a working time machine. Many years later, watching the movie E.T., I watched the alien build his communicator in that same ridiculously easy way.
Can we go back in time? Einstein was not much fun for time travel enthusiasts. Though we might imagine going back in time and righting wrongs (small ones of our own or large historical ones), he pretty much concluded that if we were to travel back, we would be who we were and do what we had done again. It’s an infinite loop. It doesn’t make for a good story or film. (So much for Back to the Future.)
. They talk about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television. You can 
.
which also contains interviews with successful people and tries to reach some conclusions about how they achieved success. Robinson interviews people who have been successful in the arts, sports, education, and business how they have found in their “Element.” Now, reading about people like Paul McCartney, The Alchemist author Paulo Coelho and Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons might be interesting and might be inspiring, but the value of the book would have to be whether or not it leads YOU towards your element. These people were able to make a living (as in a salary) from a passion or were able to significantly enrich their lives through their passion. They are “in their element.”
