Free is good
April 16 2008
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.
Post a Comment
- 2
Kevin | 4/16/2008 2:29:42 PM
Ok now that skin deal is pretty nifty. Certainly opens options to pretty up that space, I can see a corp logo in there somewhere or some such thing.
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Bjørn http://bjornfree.com/ | 4/16/2008 3:07:20 PM
Actually, if I remember correctly, Wired gave away free copies of that issue to the first 10,000 people who e-mailed them and asked nicely.
Slightly off-Lotus topic, I've recently tried the Free Is Good theory myself, by offering free downloads at my Web site (bjornfree.com , of course) of a travel book I've written. Not mainly because I believe it makes good business sense, but because I enjoy writing and traveling, and because I make enough from the Domino programming I do that I simply don't find it necessary or worth the tax reporting hassle. #8D)
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Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 4/16/2008 3:11:12 PM
One thing to keep in mind is that the textured workspace (which is what the MarvelClient is overriding) significantly increases network traffic when used with Citrix or Windows Terminal Services, or Sametime screen sharing. In those scenarios it is best to turn off the textured workspace.
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mdmadph http://mdm-adph.blogspot.com | 4/16/2008 3:51:29 PM
GMail can put their upper limit on box space to anything they want -- as long as the average upload speed in this country is usually <512Kbps, I can't really see it being very practical -- who's going to spend hours uploading large files just so they can email them? Does GMail even allow it?
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mdmadph http://mdm-adph.blogspot.com | 4/16/2008 3:52:01 PM
On a side note, that skin mod is really cool looking, and really spruces up Notes 6.
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Scott Cochrane http://thebigredshark.com | 4/16/2008 4:17:32 PM
And yet a lot of companies still have sub 100Mb quotas! It does make it damned hard to explain to staff why their mailbox is so small when the obvious retort is .."but I get X Gbs with <put your webmail provider here>" :-)
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Chris Blatnick http://interfacematters.com | 4/16/2008 4:20:50 PM
Wired was cool enough to give away 10,000 free copies, though. That was nice. :-)
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David Bell | 4/16/2008 9:32:25 PM
@7 - "but I get X Gbs with <put your webmail provider here>"
That is such a glib, thoughtless, but unfortunately very typical response from most people. No-one gets anything for free in this world. Period.
To mdmadph's point, very few users will ever come close to using it. Any organization can set a quota ridiculously high and "say" they match Google, etc.
Google runs 000's (that's thousands not hundreds) of servers. Not all for mail I'm sure, but how many companies want to or can afford to run that kind of infrastructure ?
I would be curious to know just how much they could actually support in reality, right now. The impression they give is that every user can have 6.5GB, but I bet it's much much less.
Remember their entire business model is built on getting relevant advertising in front of users. They don't want to store your data because they like you. It is in their best interests to host as much personal data as possible so that they can mine it and better target advertising to you. Why else would they want you to think you were getting all that storage for "free" ?
- 10
Lee | 4/17/2008 5:01:09 AM
Wired have embraced the 'free' business model for a long time. They give away the previous issue of their magazine online as soon as the next one comes out and provide a huge searchable resource for their entire back catalogue.
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Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 4/17/2008 9:10:53 AM
If you improve archiving or use a 3rd party addin or just change the way people use email(use doclinks at a minimum) or install Quickr with the auto attachment option so every mail can append to it, you leverage your servers in a better way.
One client has a 15gb mail archive, and wants to know how best to work with it.
When they also pointed to Google I reminded them that it would be very costly to host a file that size, for 1 person, with them.
I just laughed when they asked about Exchange for it.
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Steven | 4/17/2008 10:15:03 AM
Maybe folks outside of this blog are just naive, but we had all the ad revenue that gmail gets by scanning all your emails and providing you with advertisements based on the content of your email messages, WE'D be able to put up servers that have GBs and GBs of space for everyone's mail file.
If some folks here are that naive, just try this... Send you Gmail account an email with the subject line "Harry Potter" and add a few lines with harry potter in the text. Now go read the email in Gmail. This is the list of "Sponsored Links" and "Related Pages" I got when I opened the email message:
Harry Potter Theme Parks
Harry Potter Quiz
If You Love Harry Potter
You Will Love Alivan's Magic Wands. Shop Harry Potter Gifts Today!
White Wizard Toys
Chicagoland Retailer of Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy Collectibles
Harry Potter
Hot or Not? See what customers say.
Related Pages
Actor Jim Broadbent Talks Role as Professor Slughorn
The Leaky Cauldron.org - Apr 15, 2008
Actor Jim Broadbent has given a new interview where he briefly ...
Each time I get a call about our mail quotas and gmail or hotmail comes up, I share this fact and people are quite shocked that thier email is being used in this manner.
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Harry | 4/17/2008 2:33:52 PM
@12 - "...ad revenue that gmail gets by scanning all your emails and providing you with advertisements based on the content of your email messages..."
There's no way that Google would do that! I'm sure all those Sponsored/Related Links ads were just a coincidence:-)
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Giulio http://www.buzznotes.com.au | 4/17/2008 8:18:42 PM
I read through that Wired article and the author, Chris Anderson made some reasonable observations, but setting the perception that the future of digital business will result in everything being free I think is obsurd.
Chris focues on purely commodity services/products which is undeniably true and can exploit this approach well. But this model fast breaks down once you add the aspect of a service provided for "free" via human labour.
Free software is a classic example where the potential problems start to appear, and the risks with committing to freeware and openSource become apparent. As long as you go into it aware of those risks then you could do well out of it, or it could sink your business.
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mike | 4/22/2008 4:17:06 PM
Since we only get less than 1 GB for mail in Westford, do you think IBM will mind if I use Gmail for backup of documents? That don't provide us with any facility to do that either.
I wish we could extend the list of freebies...
- POP3-based Lotus Notes Express, sans ID security;
- DWA-based { Link } with a 6.5 GB mailbox and kick-ass spam protection using SpamSentinel or something like that again for free.
Wouldn't it be cool to remove "... a barrier to adoption...", create "... the awareness/buzz/word-of-mouth, or the upsell opportunities. " I know, I know, I'm dreaming, but sometimes I just can't help it.