At work I got an email saying that my Outlook inbox was over the allotted bandwidth. I was shocked, (not “how-can-this-be” shock, because I save everything so I did not doubt I did indeed reach the allocation level) because we had an allocation level that I was able to reach. I look to my Gmail and Yahoo accounts and for years their maximum allocation has grown well faster than I could catch, even with saving just about every email.
Yahoo recently announced that they are doing away with the allocation altogether, this is relatively trivial; considering they were already outside the scope of most people’s usage, but at the same time it was absolutely a huge move. Since the costs of storage continue to drop, Yahoo determined it was too cheap to meter and more strategic to just give it away for free, and find the revenue in another way (advertising or cross-selling perhaps).
This move to the FREE business model is the basis of this very illuminating WIRED magazine article from Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail). This article dives into the business strategies of the digital age, and the new economics that are essentially being invented on the fly that make sense of this bold new world. It’s a very intriguing look at the where we are economically and how the Internet and digital media is driving where we are heading, to a world where we get a whole lot more, for FREE.
