We all love our free stuff: search, social networks, review-sites - it's all good. However, free is a bad fit for quality. Services like FeedBurner (which tracks stats about the subscribers to your feed) are free. This means two things:
- You don't need to pay to get value from it.
- You have no recourse when it doesn't work, or isn't consistent, or ...
While many free services do work with traditional market pressures (if you don't like Google, you can go to Ask or wherehaveyou), services like FeedBurner do not transfer. Essentially, if you find yourself using a unique service which is free, don't expect to be able to apply any customer pressure (especially if revenue is being generated by a minority of paid up customers while you, the majority, are marginal).
Hopefully, Chris Anderson is going to explain why free does work in his next book (though at his recent talk at KDD he was talking about a different book studying the economics of shoes...)
Did I mention: FeedBurner reported 30% fewer subscribers today for this feed.
I definitely hear you! Even when things aren't free, I can have a hard time getting good customer service with large conglomerates (cough-Comcast-cough). I see the same issues with some of the open source systems. You may get it for free, but if you rely on the software or tools to run your business, it could spell disaster. Really, it comes down to cost/benefit analysis. The majority of the time if it means compromising your service, it's probably worth the money to become a paying customer. I guess that's just reality...
Posted by: Tony | October 11, 2007 at 08:44 PM
Interesting timing for this post. I just dumped Feedburner in favor of Bloglines.
Posted by: Jeff Carr | October 12, 2007 at 11:39 AM
Free is good, to some extent. If you want to refinance a home mortgage, for instance, the internet provides a free mortgage calculator.
Generally though, free stuff have tradeoffs.
Posted by: Arjen | October 13, 2007 at 03:55 AM
I dunno... Google Analytics doesn't cost me anything. Either does a lot of the open source "stuff" I make my livelihood with. So, I'm thinking certain free things are quite good. 0% introductory balance transfers are quite good d too. Mr. Anderson should have an easy time of it
Posted by: Gerald Buckley | October 18, 2007 at 02:24 PM