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Will Everything be Free? – My Review of Free

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So, I’m on a roll now. As promised I would share my review of several books. This is the next one: Free by Chris Anderson. An article in Wired about Free triggered me to read this book. Free is a big deal nowadays. Many products and services are offered for free. And people are making lots of money charging nothing. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough…” (p. 3) Free has always been around a long time, but it’s changing. The internet seems to be doing something interesting to what we pay for things. “Somewhere in the transition from atoms to bits, a phenomenon that we thought we understood was transformed. “Free” became Free.” (p. 4) This book is about this phenomenon. Chapter 1-3 dive into the fascinating history of free. And the different kinds of free: direct cross-subsidies, three-party market, freemium and nonmonetary markets. (p. 23) Free started out as a marketing method. Now free is an entirely new economic model. (p. 12) The old free was based on the econ...

Intranet in 2020 #intra10

4th keynote at Intranet 2010 by Peter Hinssen . Will intranets be around in the future? 4 fundamentals: content (old, put stuff somewhere) intelligence knowledge collaboration (newer, share things) The trash bin is not used a lot in IT. We are drowning in information but are starved of knowledge - John Naisbitt. Is information still of strategic value? Paperless office Consumerization of IT. Leading to new behavior wrt information. Information behavior is key. It's moving quicker than hardware development. Digital is the new normal. We are half-way there. Let's take this to the limit. It's not information overload, but it's filter failure. Show me your folders and I will tell you who you work for. The depth of information will go to infinity. The price of information will go to 0. Privacy, we will live in a fish-bowl society. Patience is also going to 0. Users don't want to fill things out again and again. And the internet will be real-time. Now refl...

From Atoms to Bits and Back

Oof, really have to get back to blogging... I've been very busy with a product creation process re-engineering project. In general terms it's business process re-engineering. Recently the business team release their process descriptions, way of working descriptions and requirements to manage the processes. I'm in the Architecture Team, but also one of the Functional Team members. So now it was our turn to take the requirements and flip them into a functional specification. Interesting but cumbersome work... As I tweeted I'm also reading Chris Anderson's book 'Free'. And I'm really enjoying it! One of the interesting remarks he makes is: every that goes from atoms to bit will be 'free'. But Chris Anderson doesn't stop thinking. In the last Wired issues he says the following. Very interesting stuff! "Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms,...