Tag Archives: ideas

The future is not Free: a Belgian Android example

there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free

via newyorker.com

Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out in The New Yorker something that a lot of people have chosen to ignore: storage cost is not the only cost and even if it was, the numbers needed to make some business run on top of free (or gratis) are so high that they end up meaning millions.

Free is not the Holy Grail of the Internet. To have a sustainable ecosystem we need to have sources of revenue that do not involve having half the planet using our service. Smaller companies tailoring a product to a smaller audience must charge to sustain their business… and that is good!

Free, for most of the companies, is nothing more than an appetizer to their products and services, it is a marketing tool. Only a few products or services can survive with a viable free based model, where the source of revenue does not come directly from the users.

The flip side of the gratis market is the products and services provided by volunteers. I don’t want an economy where all services are provided by unpaid volunteers: this would make my life worst. Having volunteers working to promote their ideas, services and products is great, but they also need to feed, lodge and enjoy life themselves, and the only way for them to have this is by having an income. It would be an even more unreliable world where I would get much less service and in worst conditions. I’m a Linux user, I know what I’m talking about.

Due to the conditions of sale of Android Phones in Belgium, I have just suffered a painful real life example of what it would be to live in a free only world: the paid applications market is not available in Belgium. I’ve had to hack/crack/flash/root my phone in order to be able to install an application that allows me access to paying Android apps (MarketEnabler.) A lot of the free apps are great, but when I need a professional application (like a tool to access Basecamp, manage multiple Google Analytics accounts, or work with multiple profiles in Twitter) the only choice in a <i>gratis</i> market is to wait for a possible application that nobody knows when it is going to come out, who is going to make it or if it will be updated. Living in a free only market sucks. That’s why I’ve decided to void my warranty and changed the software in my phone: I wanted the full experience, not just a crippled experience.

In fact if you want to live in a free/gratis economy (or almost) you can already do so and get the full benefits: become a homeless beggar. Sounds enticing? So does a full gratis internet economy.

Yes, blogging has peaked and it is not a problem

According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, blogging activity has dropped drastically among young adults in the United States, a demographic that traditionally helps define the tenor of the online conversation. In December 2007, for instance, 28 percent of all 18-to-29-year-olds with an Internet connection kept some sort of blog. By the same time last year, that number hovered around 15 percent. Meanwhile, the number of teens who say they blog regularly continues to shrink, as the Web’s youngest users ditch the blogosphere for the frantic pace of the social-media world.

via abcnews.go.com

The study from Pew Research does nothing but confirm what we all have been noticing around us: amateur blogging is disappearing. While I don’t think it will completely die, it is clear that the big amounts of effort it requires and the little rewards it entitles are not the best ways to incentive blog writing. Only professional bloggers have enough incentives to keep on writing regularly.

Of all the blogs I follow, only the professional ones keep up the pace. A lot of personal bloggers have stopped writing or greatly reduced their contributions. Why wouldn’t they with Facebook and Twitter’s instant gratification and reduced effort? Why on earth would we have to consider that it is a problem?

Lets face it, most of the personal blogposts are exactly that, personal, and directed to a group of friends: they will be much better served in a less publicly scrutinized platform like Facebook, or Netlog, or Tuenti, or you-name-the-closed-garden-social-network.

The same goes for Twitter. If we translate it to our day to day communications in fisical-out-of-the-web-world with other humans, most of what we do is chit-chat, send and receive small bits of information. We discuss things we have seen and find worthy of an exchange and direct friends and colleagues towards them if they do not know them. We make a lot of small talk so that we get to know each other better and feel more comfortable for the day when we will have more profound / serious / long conversations. Doesn’t it sound a lot like what we do on Twitter and blogging?

Smaller effort and instant or almost satisfaction: sounds like a winning combination.

Social networking, just like Google, does not makes us stupid, it makes us more communicative and efficient in our communications. It is all about human relations. Technology just enables us to multiply our contacts with other human beings. Why would this be a problem?

What we are witnessing is just the adaptation of Internet communication to the inner needs of social humans.

Suggested reading: Manifesto on management 2.0

Manifesto: management 2.0

Management 2.0 is not about a CEO having a blog or a cool presence engineered by his PR people. It is not about having Twitter accounts and nice Facebook pages. Management 2.0 is about rethinking radically the way companies and more generally organizations are being managed; from the way they manage suppliers, to the employment relationships they build, to how they design their products and services, to the support they offer to customers, to the influence they exert, to how they relate to the world and their local communities… It’s about more than just enterprise 2.0 seen through the narrow lens of cool AJAX applications with wikis, blogs and sharing functionality. Management 2.0 is about symbiotic relationships between adult humans at work. It’s about workspace that is not a place where people go to die 8 hours a day to earn a living standard. Management 2.0 is about making people reach their highest potential at work, so here are a few points of a M2.0 manifesto…

Read the rest at questerous.businessquests.com

Alexandre Papanastassiou has posted this interesting manifesto on what management should be in today’s times.

Although I agree that the quality of the product is very important, I do not agree with the idea that the product itself is the marketing. This falls into the traditional engineer trap where the creators of a product just concentrate their efforts in the product and disregard marketing.

Without marketing your great product will die in obscurity. There are many forms of marketing and different actions to take depending on your willingness and resources. If you do not plan to do any marketing for your product you might as well spend your development money in lottery: you have the same chances of success.