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It sounds to me like you are quoting verbatim something Chris Anderson might say. Software companies in the valley have gotten along just fine charging for services and software with only giving users a token free trial. Microsoft and Oracle are doing just fine. If you want to look at the big players on the web, there are far more public companies charging for services then there are whose main product is free. Akamai, Sales Force, Amazon, Ebay, NetFlix, Omniture (now adobe) I could go on and on. When talking about public companies who give their primary service away for free, I can only think of 4examples with market caps over a billion: Google, Yahoo, IACI, and sometimes Monster. There is a lot of hype about free, thanks especially to Chris Anderson's highly accessible book and influence, but if you look at the results and who really made it big (not 100 million dollar exit big, but multi billion dollar market cap big), starting with a business model where you charge your customers is the best way to achieve that. |