The New York Times bestselling author heralds the new future of business in Free.
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates thriving niche markets, allowing products and eager consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. In order to succeed in the twenty-first century economy, Free is more than a promotional gimmick: It's a business strategy that is essential to a company's successful future.
Traditional economics operates under fundamental assumptions of scarcity. After all, there's only so much oil, iron, and gold in the world. But what if the fundamentals of an economy aren't governed by constraints?
The growing online economy is built upon three cornerstones: processing power, hard drive storage, and bandwidth. The costs of all these elements are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10, and now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor-effectively too cheap to price).
Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. This is the engine behind the new Free, the one that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. In a world where prices always seem to go up, the cost of anything built on these three technologies will always go down. And keep going down, until they are as close to zero as possible.
In Free,Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new economy, and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of both consumers and business alike.