Chris Anderson of Wired said that Free is the price of the future. Some of us beg to differ. Among those with other opinions are Lincoln Murphy of 16 Ventures who published a paper called The Reality of Freemium in SaaS, and Dave McClure, who wrote Subscriptions are the new Black on his always entertaining [...]
If you’re in the software industry, don’t miss SaaS University in Dallas, January 26-28. With over 30 sessions, this event provides the best opportunity for folks in the SaaS community to learn, share, and network. Get early bird pricing through December 21, and save an additional $100 with the code MIMIRAN100. One of the sessions [...]
We mentioned in a previous post that Microsoft is in the grips of a pricing dilemma. Changing paradigms have weakened Microsoft’s dominant position in operating systems and office productivity programs. Businesses and affluent consumers no longer upgrade regularly. What they have now is good enough. Developing markets that don’t need to maintain backwards compatibility with [...]
Microsoft is between a rock and hard place. The Redmond software giant made an enviable $17.6B in profit last year (see MSFT for more details) but the stock is down from its bubbly peak and has been stagnant for almost a decade. Competitors that once cowered in the corner are now nipping at the company’s [...]
With consumers shunning gas-guzzling SUVs and easy financing gone the way of $1.00/gallon gas, Detroit is in trouble. Some people have called for government intervention. Others have suggested that the best thing to do is allow the big carmakers to go bankrupt. (Mitt Romney managed to do both, naturally.) The policy debate aside, what pricing [...]
Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson recently wrote a provocatively-titled article called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Anderson argues that the economics of computing on the net, where storage and bandwidth costs fall even faster than the cost of processing power, will drive the price of many services to the marginal cost– in other [...]
Josh Kopelman over at the Redeye VC blog has a great post (see image from post– click for larger image in original post) on the importance of the part of the demand curve when the price moves from “free” to “not-free.” As a venture capitalist, Josh focuses on the need to understand how hard it [...]
We mentioned earlier that we were about to do a webinar on Effective Pricing and Value Capture, as part of the FeaturePlan webinar series. The recorded versions (Flash and mp3) are now available online. Oh, and it’s also dugg on Digg.com. The webinar focuses on high tech products, but many of the techniques apply across [...]
On Wednesday, January 24, I’ll be presenting a webinar on Effective Pricing and Value Capture at 12 noon EST. If you don’t make it live, we will make a recording available later (we’ll post a link here). Effective Pricing and Value Capture How a little planning can make a huge difference to product success. Pricing [...]
Last week, Microsoft launched its much hyped iPod competitor, dubbed Zune. The Zune is another mp3 player, with the ability to share songs with other nearby Zunes. Pricing for the Zune itself is straightforward, and basically at parity to the iPod. What’s funny is the song pricing. Rather than just let people buy songs for [...]
