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> It’s obvious why the likes of Facebook and Google don't charge for their products: It costs nearly nothing to transmit, say, one Gmail or host, say, one photo
by m11a 7y ago
> It’s obvious why the likes of Facebook and Google don't charge for their products: It costs nearly nothing to transmit, say, one Gmail or host, say, one photo on Instagram.
This already doesn't make sense. This wrong logic could be extended to every paid service which doesn't rely on an external service, especially SaaS, on the internet. If this reasoning was correct, everything from Zendesk to Superhuman to GitHub (pre-Microsoft pricing) should be free. Development costs money, and hosting overall costs a fair bit of money (because every user doesn't just post one picture, or have one email, and it compounds).
The real reason it is free is because they want users, and make more money from ads than they would charging a reasonable price (which would massively cut adoption anyway).
- sidlls 7y agoYes, I stopped reading at that point. What does the author think the small army of software engineers and researchers that create their products are paid? Nothing?
- abvdasker 7y agoYes, the premise of this article almost immediately struck me as being quite off base. The economics of pure tech companies at this point are well understood: large up front investment with near-zero (but importantly not actually zero) marginal costs. This article seems to be written by someone who doesn't understand the engineering side of things. At scale, the extremely low cost of serving an individual request ends up being potentially costly in aggregate, which is why the larger a web service gets, the more important performance becomes.