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good reading: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

  • Artikel

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.......

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A typical online site follows the 1 Percent
Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest. In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays
for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the
cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.

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Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to
shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now
starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised
on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming
the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to
get.

read full story on https://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free#

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