3 ms·
I also have the feeling Iskold is wrong in several places. The one thing he got right is the GMail case, where big companies are "ready to take a loss to kill
by cawel 19y ago
I also have the feeling Iskold is wrong in several places.
The one thing he got right is the GMail case, where big companies are "ready to take a loss to kill the competition" (as said by dkokelly).
His tale about the DVR implies that if it's free, it's going to work. But consumers still have the ability to figure out which of 2 free products is best. Free does not preclude quality. Same rules as before apply.
His tale about startups worried about not being funded is far from convincing. VC's will always fund bright, innovative, potentially profitable startups (with the freeconomics model or others).
His tale about advertisement is not clear. If your ad-sponsored business is going well (during an economic downturn), there is an argument for advertisers to focus on you, and not others that fare less well.
His tale about complex transactions is wrong. Paying only for what you use is far from a bad concept: it creates several types of demand among your consumer-base. And it seems to work, as several European low-cost airlines showed during the last years.
- konsl 19y ago"But consumers still have the ability to figure out which of 2 free products is best. Free does not preclude quality. Same rules as before apply." That's why his argument that free will impact innovation is wrong as well. If anything, this promotes innovation and kills incrementalism.
- cdr 19y agoHe got GMail wrong, too. Yahoo Mail is/was not "perfectly good". Yahoo Mail was pretty poor. Slow, packed with blinking ads, lacking important features, poor spam filtering, etc. GMail won because it was a superior product. The storage was a marketing tactic - the limits Yahoo had were low, but not that low. GMail wasn't even free at first - I paid $6 for my account to some guy on eBay, and would've happily paid Google for it. How much were Yahoo/Hotmail making from premium webmail? Not that much, I would guess, and it seems inevitable that charging for something so paltry was going to last anyway.
- llimllib 19y ago> His tale about advertisement is not clear. If your ad-sponsored business is going well (during an economic downturn), there is an argument for advertisers to focus on you, and not others that fare less well. I was listening to NPR this morning, and this scenario is exactly what happened to No Depression magazine. Rising customers and interest, but declining record industry advertising budget, leads to a magazine no longer being published.