I've recently read two books dealing with a similar subject matter: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything Don Topscott and Anthony Williams and Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. To get to my conclusion, Free is the much better of the two. Anderson is a much better writer, while Topscott And Williams have a painfully repetitive and prophetic tone. Their general messages are very much similar, which is that consumers now expect free content and that there is nothing wrong with that.
Anderson, despite being a "mere" journalist, has more and better economics on his side. The way he phrases his argument is that in today's world of bits (in contrast to atoms), the marginal cost of providing a good is so close to zero that it makes sense to round down to zero and get them to pay another way. This version of "free" is categorically different than previous generations' skeptical understanding of "free" stuff because free stuff in the time before computers nearly always meant that you would be paying someway else later (e.g. one month trials). Today, companies can easily afford to give away literally free services if a certain portion of hardcore users is willing to pay for a better service. This is actually just one way, what Anderson calls "freemium", that online businesses now can choose to pay for their operations. On a similar note, Anderson temporarily released his book for free on pdf form soon after it was published, although the links are no longer (legally) up anywhere. You can still score the book for free in an unabridged audiobook format, however. Recommended.
Topscott and Williams fail where Anderson succeeds. This may be unfair since their book was published way(?) back in 2006, while Anderson published his just last year. Still, what is supposed to be a serious business, economic-y book should have a use-by date of at least a decade from when it was published. The authors' discussions of social networking sites focuses on myspace, for example, and it was already being passed by facebook at that point (it should also be noted that facebook would not have gelled quite as nicely with their thesis as myspace does). The thesis in general is a subtle (but less focused, and paradoxically, more specific) variation on free price- companies will and must begin releasing free IP into the marketplace in exchange for (often) free labor from volunteers. IBM did this with many of their patents and was thus able to plant themselves in the Linux community; they now profit from selling services in connection with that. These anecdotes in general are far less interesting than Anderson's and focus on interviewing company executives as a way of buttressing their statements. While they make a couple references to Ronald Coase's theory of the firm, the arguments in the book are not especially well-endowed in economic theory. Ultimately, the book may have been somewhat readable if it was one hundred pages shorter, but as it is, far too much time is spent sermonizing about their grandoise predictions of the future of business - with predictions that have already been falsified.
This is a topic I'm definitely interested in, and nonfiction publishers have pumped out quite a few books on topics similar to this in recent years. Of these two however, you now know where I stand.
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