But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free.
There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).
In 1961, Anderson says, a single transistor was ten dollars. In 1963, it was five dollars. By 1968, it was one dollar. Today, Intel will sell you two billion transistors for eleven hundred dollars—meaning that the cost of a single transistor is now about .000055 cents.
Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn’t have worked in 1784, and they’re not going to work very soon in the future either.
People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people
a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper,
The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted.
Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn’t have worked in 1784, and they’re not going to work very soon in the future either.
One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality | June 2009 | Communications of the ACM
- Diffusing a new innovation requires understanding the local environment.
- Innovative technology can be disruptive and trigger a backlash from incumbents.
- Innovative information technologies do not stand alone.
- Understand the true costs and risks, as well as benefits, of innovation.
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Adopting organizations need to develop internal capabilities and set priorities.
The fact that OLPC was much stronger in developing innovative technology than in understanding how to diffuse it may reflect the engineering orientation of the organization and its lack of understanding of the needs or interests of the nontechnical people who will ultimately buy and use the innovation.
Deployment involves training teachers, creating software and digital content, delivering maintenance and support, and sustaining a long-term commitment. Such capabilities are in short supply in developing countries,7,26 and OLPC simply never had the resources to provide them.
IT innovation is also part of socially embedded systems, the use of which cannot be isolated from the social and cultural environment or from local norms of practice.1,25 In some cases, teachers and the educational establishment have resisted innovation that requires a significant change in pedagogy and that might reduce teacher status.
