So how valuable is something if you can get it or use it free of charge?

In some cases, not very valuable at all. Take your neighborhood newspaper, the one that shows up on your driveway or mailbox, once a week or so. The one I get is mostly garbage – full of fluff stories about a local school or real estate brokerage, packed with ads from vendors in the same local area.

I never understood the value of the local papers. They’re full of stories that are either not newsworthy (see above) or stories that have been fully covered by more competent news orgainzations by the time the local paper is printed. And the ads? These are for businesses that I drive by every day, so the incremental value of them getting or staying in my mind just isn’t there.

That’s one example, and there are surely thousands of others. But what about something we value more specifically, and more highly, that we regularly obtain for free? To be clear, when I say free here – I mean free of the classic monetary exchange for goods or services.

How about television? Well, that’s free using my definition. But aren’t you actually trading something of value to the TV networks in exchange for the endless hours of “Real Life Idiots Survive – Live” or whatever else they’re beaming at us. Of course you are – you’ve traded them your willingness to watch & listen to advertisements (to the tune of approximately 12 minutes worth per half hour of programming time). This bargain has happily existed since the 50s, but the relatively recent introduction of technologies that allow viewers to time-shift commercials has the classic networks up in arms.

We’ve changed our end of the bargain, but they can keep beaming us the programming, thank you very much.

How does this apply to other implied bargains? For example, a recent rumor floating around has Google offering an Ajax Office. Briefly (whether real or not), this is an online Office Suite powered by AJAX. Sounds cool, but will I use it? Probably not. I get the “free” aspect of it (and the rumor has it being free, at least initially), but I can’t get over the *actual cost* to me:

Security. Real, honest-to-goodness, security that comes from having my documents on my hard drive, and not on Google’s servers.

Some of the very earliest – and longest dead now – models were for both web-based storage and web-based desktops. The security concerns weren’t easily overcome. Free is ok, because the user is trading off his/her real security concerns for the perceived value that he/she is obtaining at no monetary cost. I have heard *all* of these arguments against using freepository for corporate software development (“I’m not storing my valuable corporate IP on a server that isn’t under my control”, etc.)

That’s the focus of one of my upcoming announcements – when dollars change hands, the buyer wants *zero* ambiguity about the security of his/her data.

If Google is seriously considering this (no indication it is or isn’t), then it may well take it into an Icarus scenario. I just can’t see how a critical mass will ever reasonably make this trade-off.

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