Ed Brill

Free is good

I've been meaning to write about the concept of "free" for a few weeks, after Wired ran a story called, "Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business" a few weeks back.  I notice that they did not drop their own subscription price to free, but OK.  The article is a good one and makes a point as to why so many vendors have gotten into the act of giving things away...either as trial editions, limited editions, a sub-segment of their offerings/capabilities, or the like.  Free certainly removes a barrier to adoption, and can pay back in terms of the value of data collected associated with free, the brand equity created, the awareness/buzz/word-of-mouth, or the upsell opportunities.  Of course, in some cases, free offers are simply corporate benevolence, and that's nice, too.

A few freebies that have crossed my radar in the last few days:

• Florian Vogler announced the "FREE MarvelClient Skinning Edition for IBM Lotus Notes" which allows you to skin the Notes workspace (aka "chicklets") with an image/look of your choice, such as

• I recently had the opportunity to tell a customer who wants to be able to do mail merge from Word into Notes about Integra for Notes Personal Edition. which is free.  It has a few other cool features, including being able to export your Notes contacts into a spreadsheet-readable format.  Cool stuff.

I'm also amazed as Google's gmail is now up to 6.5 GB of free storage per mailbox.  It's really starting to make the days of 100 MB mailbox quotas look a little weird.