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80 of 91 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great ideas and even better when implemented, July 24, 2009
This review is from: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hardcover)
I read the original WIRED magazine article written by Mr. Anderson that this book is based on back in February 2008; I've been anxiously awaiting this book... and I've just finished it.
First off, I've implemented a few "freebies" in the past year that I give away in my line of work; the question was whether it would pay off. It did. I offered something of value (to me, and I believe to my customer) and waited to see if interest in the free item would increase sales of a companion item. Sales were there.
So many people are attacking the book for various reasons, but for me the key question for rating this book was "Is the author's information accurate and can it hold up to real-world results?" The answer is Yes.
A lot of things in the book aren't relevant to me, but I've taken what I can from it (in addition to the original article) and made some changes in how I do business. (I'm a small business owner, not a corporate giant.)
You can agree or disagree with the book's overall theme, but my findings are that the book has a solid grasp on how any business that has any Internet-related sales or support must adapt. The author's argument about how costs are moving to zero for the "bits" world is dead-on.
I find it humorous that so many negative reviews of the book are simply about the price of the book (or the lack of price for some of the free versions). The book is about the concept of Free. Some people are seeing "Free" on the cover and whining that it has a price???
The book isn't light reading - it's got some complicated concepts that the reader must grasp, especially business owners. For that reason, I could never listen to an audio version - I've highlighted my text at various points that I want to come back to and consider how I might use the info with my work.
I give the book 5 stars - I enjoyed it, it gave me much to think about, and I didn't feel (when done) that I'd been ripped off... the value of the information contained in the book is worth much more to me than the $20 I paid.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Freeconomics, August 19, 2009
This review is from: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hardcover)
Because of the ongoing drop in the cost of bandwith, storage and computer processing power, which brings the cost of each of these digital age services to almost zero, "free" is becoming a more prevalent price with real power. For the business person and others wishing to profit from "free", the trick is to figure out how to sell services or products related to the free one. Author Chris Anderson, who also wrote Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More uses Google as one of his primary examples of how free functions in this new economy. Google provides free internet searches and makes money off the targeted ads and premium products. Music groups have gotten on board, and have let go of the idea that they muist rely on copyright protection, and have benefited handsomely by giving away their music and more than making up for it in concerts, premium versions of their music and band-related paraphernelia. Not all "free" providers have managed to "monetize" their offerings. Facebook and Twitter are two examples, although the latter is on the verge of attempting to do so.
The above successes have occured in what Anderson labels the "bits" world that relies on the electronic generation of information, but free can also work in what Anderson calls the "atoms" world, where products are things you can hold or services that you can experience. Telecommunications companies, for example, give you a free cell phone but make their money on usage and ring tones. Anderson provides a good number of examples in table form of both bits and atoms free.
For me, the most intriguing discussion centered on what Anderson calls "finding the scarcity among the abundance", which is where the money is to be made from free or to where the value migrates. I wish there had been more concrete examples because my impression is that those of us who are not necessarily gifted in the geek data and computer world might find this opportunity the best one to exploit. I also wonder if there are opportunities for free to occur in government, or is this phenomenon limited to the private sector?
In any case, the book is an interesting read and will open the reader's eyes to the reality of this new economic force.
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128 of 174 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
So glad I got it, well, free., July 20, 2009
This review is from: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hardcover)
At the "radical price" of $0.00, which was offered for a limited time, it was worth flipping through the ebook, but $26.99 for the hardcover, with no discounting? I don't think so. The book reads like an energetic but not very trustworthy blog--breathless, careless, and shoddily researched and argued.
It's been widely discussed that Chris Anderson lifted passages straight out of Wikipedia without attribution; now that the credits have been added to the electronic text, it looks pretty silly to see the notoriously uneven online reference cited again and again. I guess it was too slow/too old-school (too expensive?) to bother to do the primary research we have come to expect in a book--or even in a decent high school paper. Again and again the text feels dashed off and sloppy. Just a few examples from Chapter 7, which starts off, "On February 3, 1975, Bill Gates, then 'General Partner, MicroSoft' wrote an 'Open Letter to Hobbyists...'" and says on the following page that "Microsoft, now without a hyphen, grew rich." What hyphen? Does he mean a capital s? There's a subhead, "The Penguin Attacks," that's incomprehensible to people who don't already know the history of free software he's supposed to be explaining; then another subhead, "Case Two," without a "Case One."
What is "free," anyway? A lot of it sounds like a variation on bait-and-switch: e.g., give away a free cell phone but charge activation and monthly fees; offer a free basic version of a product but charge for the "premium" edition people really want; give doctors free software for electronic health records in return for access to data on those doctors' patients (yikes). Chris Anderson applies a version of the model to himself: "So you can read a copy of this book online (abundant, commodity information) for free, but if you want me to fly to your city and prepare a custom talk on free as it is applies to your business, I'll be happy to, but you're going to have to pay me for my (scarce) time. I've got a lot of kids and college isn't getting any cheaper."
Sadly, based on the quality of the thinking in this (free) book, I can't recommend paying for any premium version. Let the buyer beware.
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