[ahoyhere]

Yes, you got it!

There's also a good reason to believe that lots of people WOULD pay for something like Gmail.

Remember people trying to sell off invites back in the early days?

More importantly, having a direct line to the company controlling their email -- attached by money -- is a very appealing prospect for people who understand that free is dicey.

[extension]

They will pay if it's effortless and trivially cheap and the competition isn't free either. The app store(s) have proved this.

[ahoyhere]

Yes, people will push a meh product, not do any ground marketing, do a piss poor job of communicating, -- and, from the start, not solve a problem or reach out to their customers in the right way -- then they will fail to make sales, and they will blame the "well-known fact" that people don't pay for things.

In the mean time, I'm making a lot of money selling things where there are tons of free alternatives. People don't pay for content? I made $40,000 writing & selling an ebook about rich web app performance.

I'm hardly the only one.

Lots of people would rather blame the market, blame the customer, or blame the economy than consider that maybe they didn't do due diligence.

I'll be writing a lot more about that in the future.