Why $0. 0. 0 Is the Future of Business. At the age of 4. 0, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork- lined bottle caps. It was 1. 89. 5, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away. Developer of personal and professional software in categories including mobility, utilities and multimedia.True Combat Elite is closed source, but still a great game and free. From the FAQ at True Combat Europe (http:// 10. How about moving to the Q3 GPL engine or its forks? ITunes is the easiest way to organize and enjoy the music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books you already have — and shop for the ones you want to get. You can even listen to free streaming radio stations with iTunes Radio. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired. One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable- blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1. In information technology, an application is a computer program designed to help people perform an activity. An application thus differs from an operating system (which runs a computer), a utility (which performs. Archive of free downloads for Windows including a huge library of games and software trials. Pad Files accepted for submission. Features completely hosted shopping cart software and ecommerce solutions. Offers merchant accounts, automatic responders, ad tracking and marketing tools. Gillette sold a total of 5. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits (. Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets. Chris Anderson discusses . Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything . The new model is based not on cross- subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2. 00. 7 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. Information also wants to be expensive . Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on My. Space that grasped the audience- building merits of zero. The fastest- growing parts of the gaming industry are ad- supported casual games online and free- to- try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG- 4. The rise of . Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 1. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. Technology sure doesn't feel free when you're buying it by the gross. Yet if you look at it from the other side of the fat pipe, the economics change. That expensive bank of hard drives (fixed costs) can serve tens of thousands of users (marginal costs). The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It's not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it's about what that equipment can do. And every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, it does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero. Photo Illustration: Jeff Mermelstein. As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it's obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T- shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways). Digital technology benefits from these dynamics and from something else even more powerful: the 2. Newtonian to quantum machines. We're still just beginning to exploit atomic- scale effects in revolutionary new materials — semiconductors (processing power), ferromagnetic compounds (storage), and fiber optics (bandwidth). In the arc of history, all three substances are still new, and we have a lot to learn about them. We are just a few decades into the discovery of a new world. What does this mean for the notion of free? Well, just take one example. Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn't totally clear, that's . And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case. For good reason: It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (You. Tube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing. One of the old jokes from the late- '9. Internet: infinity and zero. The first, at least as it applied to stock market valuations, proved false. But the second is alive and well. The Web has become the land of the free. The result is that we now have not one but two trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy. The first is the extension of King Gillette's cross- subsidy to more and more industries. Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set. Ryanair, for instance, has disrupted its industry by defining itself more as a full- service travel agency than a seller of airline seats (see . There's nothing new about technology's deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics. When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). So, too, for everything from banking to gambling. The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination. WASTE AND WASTE AGAIN. Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever- increasing computing power. Every 1. 8 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1. Intel's latest quad- core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to . An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. In the glass- walled facilities of the mainframe era, these systems operators exercised their power by choosing whose programs should be allowed to run on the costly computing machines. Their role was to conserve transistors, and they not only decided what was worthy but also encouraged programmers to make the most economical use of their computer time. As a result, early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to user interface. This was the era of the command line, and the only conceivable reason someone might have wanted to use a computer at home was to organize recipe files. In fact, the world's first personal computer, a stylish kitchen appliance offered by Honeywell in 1. Photo Illustration: Jeff Mermelstein. And here was Mead, telling programmers to embrace waste. They scratched their heads — how do you waste computer power? It took Alan Kay, an engineer working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, to show them. Rather than conserve transistors for core processing functions, he developed a computer concept — the Dynabook — that would frivolously deploy silicon to do silly things: draw icons, windows, pointers, and even animations on the screen. The purpose of this profligate eye candy? Ease of use for regular folks, including children. Kay's work on the graphical user interface became the inspiration for the Xerox Alto, and then the Apple Macintosh, which changed the world by opening computing to the rest of us. But what Mead and Kay understood was that the transistors in them — the atomic units of computation — would become so numerous that on an individual basis, they'd be close enough to costless that they might as well be free.
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