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lunes, febrero 04, 2008

8 cualidades más valiosas que "gratis"

Fundamentos de la economía de la información: ¿qué producto informativo podemos vender, si la información se copia gratis?

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?

1 comentario:

TuringTest dijo...

Mi comentario en la página del autor - lo guardo para referencia:

I think I've identified another leg to the table of generative values: Optimization.

It's related to personalization and interpretation, but slightly different to them. Optimization takes a process already used by the client, and sells a better version that achieves the same goals with more efficiency. It's not the same as personalization, because the adapted product/process is not designed by the producer but by the client. The optimized product -a planning- can also be endlessly copied, but it will not be as valuable for each new user as they will have different constraints that would need to find a different optimum.

Another distinguishing element of optimization is that it can be precisely measured - maybe a mathematical model can be built and then minimized, or parts of the process can be compared to business best practices and tailored to fit them. The knowledge to achieve this measurement can be marketed and is valuable - it's what good consultancy sells, more than just interpretation of a given tool, and is also the basics for logistics firms.