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by gedrap
3712 days ago
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>>> The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price. Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well! If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly. Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods. |
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But that's what happens in the physical world in face of competition (and that's the "great promise of capitalism", btw.) - prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure that will inflate them (like enough layers of middlemen).
But anyway, I don't mind Coursera or others trying out any business model they want. But them talking about a "mission to ensure access to education to everyone", etc.? This is getting dishonest. I'm criticizing them for saying they're doing this for humanity, while in fact getting further and further away from this goal every day.