Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.
But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."
Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.
Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.
I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.
I've been reposting this for almost four years now and I hope that this meme can stick. It's not about dumping, per se, or about sour grapes or different competition philosophies - it's about recognizing when the interests of a provider are NOT the same as your interests.
if not there already, we should put up quick poll of top x Google Reader alternatives that everyone can vote on (put it on Google Docs to add a bit of irony) w/ a light column for use case (which OS, browsers, etc).
every blog publisher then points to the poll as addendum to each post going fwds, informing readers to choose one in order to keep reading via rss.
can include some directions on exporting GR feeds for any of the GR subs that don't already help the reader do so.
granted requires some work, and we still will lose some users, but overall isn't something like this (or a better idea?) required to ensure blogs/rss ecosystem don't lose readers that don't know there are good alternatives and won't necessarily seek alternatives on their own?
Wasn't that how Rockefeller killed off small local competitors? First sell at prices cheaper than it costs to buy new stock so that small businesses went broke, and abuse the fact that you're big enough to last longer then they do. Then when there is no competition, rise prices again.
I dunno, I was told this once a long time ago and I don't know anything about Rockefeller. I see no flaws with the tactic though (aside from the ethical ones).
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Good that there are laws against it (kind of to be expected - if there weren't natural selection would result big corporations doing it all the time).
Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.
But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."
Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.
Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.
I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.