Free
An incredible and scathing review of Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” a new book about how Information Wants to be Free. I guess I’m always psyched to read scathing reviews of anything, but this one really struck me as being spot-on. The article is too pithy to really be excerpted, so I’ll just quote my favorite part and you’ll have to click the link to really get the full effect:
The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:36 am
haha, pretty good read.
although my favorite part, which i don’t know if you’ll be able to duplicate because it looks like the cartoons on the page are random each time it loads, was the one-panel cartoon i got: a couple of realistically-drawn drug dogs sitting near the visible legs of some police/SWAT type guys, and the caption reads “i think i’m starting to really like the smell of cocaine.” XD
July 1st, 2009 at 6:29 pm
I sort of dont get the quoted part?
basically, that a profit motive makes certain things happen?
July 1st, 2009 at 11:34 pm
i think basically it undermines the idea that information “wants” to be free, or really wants anything. or that the entire concept of a “free” business model, where you allow access to information without charging but you charge for some peripheral service, is really as broadly applicable as Chris Anderson claims. Like Anderson claims that the decreasing costs of technology will drive down costs of information growth and development to the point where they can be offered for free without a significant cost burden to the company developing the information in question. But what the reviewer points out is that often times the cost of information development is not the limiting factor in pricing. i.e.: drug companies where developing the drug costs less and less for sure, but there are clinical trials, FDA approval procedures, etc., that remain at a fixed or even escalating cost.