Books Are The Souvenir Edition For Your Idea

from the good-quotes dept

We've talked at length about the difference between infinite goods and scarce goods in various areas, and how you should spread the infinite ideas to make the scarce goods more valuable, but here's a great quote that puts that in perspective when it comes to books. Mathew Ingram points us to an interview with entrepreneur and author Seth Godin, where he notes:

"Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn't spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail."

That's a beautifully succinct way of explaining the entire concept, though I think that the last bit (about getting people to own the souvenir edition) may be changing as well -- and other business models will start to show up.

Filed Under: books, business models, economics, infinite goods, scarce goods, seth godin, souvenir

Reputation Is A Scarce Good... As Metallica Is Learning

from the oops dept

On Thursday, we wrote about Metallica's latest foray online, where it's attempting to build a community around its latest music. Given Metallica's history of attacking Napster all the way back in 2000, we expected there to be some pushback, but what was really stunning was how many of the comments were from people (many of whom had been big fans of the band) still pissed off about Metallica's actions, and refusing to have anything to do with the band. We weren't the only ones to notice. Wired had a story on Metallica's efforts and discovered exactly the same thing. The vast majority of the comments were vehemently negative. Clearly, Metallica really tarnished its reputation by its actions eight years ago, and it's still paying for it.

This brings up a good point, that we've mentioned in the past in the comments, but not so clearly in a post. A person, organization, band or company's reputation is an important "scarce" good -- and once damaged, it's quite difficult (though not impossible) to rebuild the shattered goodwill. When talking about what would happen in a world without copyright, for example, people often say "but in a world without copyright, couldn't someone just copy your own creation and pretend they were their own." The answer is yes, but they do so at the risk to their own reputation. If the news comes out that the person/organization/band/whatever was taking others' works and not giving credit where it was due, that would harm their reputation. And, as Metallica is learning, a tainted reputation can have serious long-term impact.

Filed Under: metallica, reputation, scarce goods

Sometimes Free Really Means Free

from the yes-there-are-free-lunches dept

"Free" seems like a simple enough concept. As we've explained in the past, there's a huge number of successful business models that involve giving away free stuff. But Adam Thierer points out that some people are still horribly confused about the nature of "free" business models. Alex Iskold claims that the "free" stuff given away by Google and other companies is an illusion. He notes that when a company offers us free stuff, it often come with a price attached: you get a free lunch, but you have to listen to an annoying timeshare sales pitch. What Iskold fails to appreciate is the difference between scarce physical goods and non-scarce information goods. It's true that if a company is giving a physical product away for free, they're probably going to try to sell you something as part of the deal. But that's because the physical product costs them money, and they'd go out of business if they gave away too many. Information goods are totally different. Once you've created a new information product, you can give away an unlimited number of copies without affecting your bottom line. And so you can afford to design your business model in a much more generous fashion. MySQL, for example, built a billion-dollar business by giving away millions of copies of its software in order to attract a few thousand companies willing to pay for its service and support offerings. Those millions of free copies of MySQL really are free.

Iskold also seems confused about the difference between monopolies and competition. He claims that Google's decision to give its word processor and spreadsheet application away is "monopolistic" and a "dangerous poker game" that's only possible because Google has a huge pile of cash. This is ridiculous on a couple of different levels. In the first place, it's absurd to think that Google's cash pile gives it an unfair advantage over Microsoft, which has one of the largest cash piles in the history of the world. Second, there are numerous other competitors in the online word processing space, such as Zoho, who don't have Google's large piles of cash, yet still give away online word processors for free. In fact, Google's own word processor actually came from a tiny startup, Writely, who had very little money, but was still giving away the product for free. Third, there's no inherent reason why word processors can't be free. You can make an unlimited number of copies of it just like any other software product. Microsoft has only retained the ability to charge hundreds of dollars for Office because they haven't had enough competition. Now that competition is increasing, the price of office software is likely to fall toward its marginal cost of zero, and companies will need to find more creative ways to turn a profit from it. Cutting prices (including cutting them to zero) in order to increase market share is the opposite of monopolistic. Consumers benefited from Microsoft's decision to give away Internet Explorer in the 1990s, and they benefit from Google's decision to give away Google Docs today.

Filed Under: business models, economics, free, scarce goods
Companies: google