This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Entrepreneurial Enabling of Entitlement -- [Rant Mode On] I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of people whining about things like the insertion of ads or the possible inclusion of "premium" membership in their (and my) beloved Twitter. And then there are the Facebookers who have freely used Zuckerberg's - and his investors' - expensive servers and tools to share their life stories, but are the first to blindly sign up for silly groups called something like "We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. Need As Many Members Possible To Stop This!".
David of 37 Signals (home of quality - and fairly priced - products like Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, and Campfire) asks a good question - not of the users who have come to expect everything for nothing, but of the enabling entrepreneurs: How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?:
"...the startup culture has caught this disease that there’s something unnatural in being profitable from the get-go. That making money early means you won’t make it big later.
"It’s depressing and it’s wrong, but I also think it’s going to change. I think the days of the traditional San Francisco startup approach are numbered. It’ll be flushed down the drain along with CDO’s and zero-down mortgages."
I know that over the years I've happily paid for stuff of value to me - like premium Flickr and Blogger accounts. (Blogger was in the early days, for which I got a Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and went fully free.) Also, my contributions to my local NPR station have grown to help sustain all the podcasts that fill my iPod and my commute. And just the other day, a friend ragged on me for buying a particular iPhone app when one with very similar functionality was out there for free. Setting aside a couple differences that beckoned me, there was also something about the willingness to charge that gave me that confidence that there might be more enhancements coming down the line and that the builders were serious about what they were doing. Who knows? Could happen.
I'll gladly cough up more for online product that I value. And builders of such products and services, if they have faith in the value of their offerings, need to have commensurate faith in their users to find that same value and be willing to accept fair pricing - happily.
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