The NYT Book Review on Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price

One of my favorites, Virginia Postrel, offers a solid review of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price in the New York Times.

She just nails it:

Opponents of the free-content argument too often reject the idea that free content is the future simply because they don’t want it to be true.[...]

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said, and that attitude has had a good two-century run. But the Web is full of blockheads, whether they’re rate-busting amateurs or professionals trawling for speaking gigs. All this free stuff raises the real standard of living, by making it ever easier for people to find entertainment, information and communication that pleases them.

Business strategy, however, seeks not only to create but to capture value. Free is about a phenomenon in which almost all the new value goes to consumers, not producers. It is false to assume that no price means no value. But it is equally false to argue that value implies profitability.

Enjoy the whole article, it's more than just a review. It offers Postrel's usual keen insight, helping us to read between the lines.

The Re-Opening Experiment

We should remind ourselves that, this Memorial Day weekend and the weeks that follow, we are subjects in a grand experiment to see how good we are at social distancing as stay-at-home orders are being slowly lifted. The state's stay-at-home order was never meant to keep you, individually, safe from infection. It was meant to keep hospital's safe from being overwhelmed by too many of us needing them at the same time. In Michigan, the daily new cases of COVID-19 are higher today than they were when we locked down in late March. We are testing whether or not we can open up (with all of our new precautions and protocols) without spiking the rate of spread, but make no mistake: it *is* an experiment, and we *are* the test subjects. Please don't get careless as things start to open up. We need to get our economies back on track, but we are still a long way (and a vaccine away) from being out of the woods. Stay vigilant, folks. Wash your hands. Wear a mask. As has always been the...

VMWorld Wednesday

Today I noticed three things: 1) All the good sessions ran today. 2) Lines for everything! 3) You can't do back-to-back sessions all day without burning out. Today's sessions were not to be missed, and everybody knew it because lines starting forming 45 minutes before some sessions. VMWorld has been on their toes, however: I didn't miss any session that I wanted to hit, and the most popular sessions from Monday and Tuesday got added back to the schedule on Wednesday and Thursday so everyone would have a crack at them. This is some very nimble work for a conference this big. Well done, VMWorld! Here's the photolog: My morning run takes me down to ferry building and up the Embarcadero. Here's the view at sunrise. This lovely scene is the hallway in my hotel. Creepy, but swank! Lines! Today was the day of lines! This was the line first thing in the AM for the Labs. More sidewalk art outside of Moscone South. Bean-bag Alley - where people and devic...

You are going to get COVID-19. Now what?

In my best estimation, this is how we should address COVID-19 at this point: 1. You are going to get COVID-19. It's very likely endemic now. Breakthrough Delta infections carry the same viral load in the nasopharynx of the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. Resign yourself to this fact. You are going to get COVID-19. If not Delta, then whatever variant comes next due to antigenic drift. 2. There is no herd immunity. There is no eradicating this virus. "Zero COVID" is a fantasy. It's too widespread, too mutable, and too contagious. Eventually, this will join the other common coronaviruses in circulation (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1). 3. The vaccines shouldn't be considered vaccines. Consider them similar to seasonal flu shots. They are here to make sure that when you get COVID-19 (And let me reiterate: You are going to get COVID-19), you are far less likely to be hospitalized or die. 4. When enough people, vaxxed and unvaxxed, get COVID-19 (And let me reiterate: You are...

Eric Reasons

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