Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre… that’s a phrase that’s been echoing through my mind today. Why? Because it’s hard to put value on something until

a.) It’s gone

or

b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

It’s part of the human condition, I’d say, we take stuff for granted when it’s abundant and freely-available and then when it’s gone and is no longer free we start to miss it, it becomes an issue of scarcity. Two situations that ride this median between scarcity and abundance come to mind, both of which are music listening-oriented.

The first is a story of my local public radio station in East Lansing, WKAR, licensed through Michigan State University ran Music from the Hearts of Space for years. I donated regularly because I wanted to support the programming, specifically HOS, as it’s referred to by fans such as myself, but then one day it happened, and HOS was pulled. What could I have done? I don’t know. I did contact station management, and received the standard “budget cuts” reply, fact-based, to be sure, but not very helpful. Bummer.

The second story has to do with Pandora, the excellent music player that came out of the Music Genome Project. I’ve cultivated an excellent playlist on Pandora over the last couple years, and it’s a music outlet I hope not to lose. However, recently they started advertising and introduced a premium service. I’m going to sign up for the premium service, almost certainly, but it got me thinking about what’s lost when you don’t lend your support, and sometimes even when you do. This takes me back to my opening points, I talked about the bummer of losing HOS, which was free, abundant and easily taken for granted. However, it’s the second point that I think of when Pandora comes to mind – b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

When something goes from being free to costing money, no matter how good it was for free, it was just free so how you could make demandments, and have expectations, but when you’re a paying customer you expect a say, you expect a great product, a product worth paying for; the algorithms that brought you Yanni when you were trying to enhance your Harold Budd playlist just aren’t as acceptable when you’re paying. The whole mindset changes.

This is one of the things I love about Google. No matter how much free stuff they give out (of course it’s not just out of the goodness their corporate heart), they don’t slouch on their offerings because they’re free. They beat expectations, they give you stuff you want before you even know you want it. Thankfully, they’ve found revenue streams outside of their software, unlike Pandora, which is the revenue stream like many other software as service Web sites.

Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre, as I’m thinking about it now, means that something is free of a price, monetary or otherwise, but with regard to libre, it’s totally free and price can’t be attached to it. That was the experience of HOS on the radio, and Pandora when it was ad-free — Libre… However, for a time, it was gratis, too… More thoughts on difference, here.

This post was one that was originally posted here, but kind of got lost in the mix, and I wanted to repost it for two reasons. First, this is a great example of using the Web to create and be creative. I was surfing Flickr, a free picture sharing site, and I found this great series by Indy Kethdy, he had them marked with a Creative Commons license, so I downloaded them, created a video, and then composed a soundtrack to the photostream. Then I posted the video on YouTube to share. This sort of the full-circle of open sharing, social media and creativity on the Web. My second reason is less profound, I know the site has some new readers, and I thought that they might enjoy checking out this video montage. Enjoy.

Indy Kethdy Video Montage with Matt Borghi Soundtrack

Surfing Flickr, as I so often do, I find images that inspire me. Last Friday night, though, I found the fantastic work of Indy Kethdy. I spent hours, and hours pouring over his pictures of Lake Michigan from around Wisconsin. I started to hear music in my ears, and imagined putting these images to sound. I was in luck, because Indy had set his pictures with a Creative Commons license that allowed me to make a video of his photos, put them to music, and then post it here for you to view. I highly recommend visiting Indy’s Flickr page – http://www.flickr.com/people/indykethdy/ and getting a taste of his excellent artistry first-hand. First, though, check out the video homage and the music that I created from the inspiration of his gorgeous still images:

There’s a lot of talk about social media and the role that companies can and/or should play in social media; but the one thing that I’ve learned is that there’s almost no place for social media in the closed organization. Companies that aren’t transparent and are secretive don’t have much of a chance with social media because social media really requires you to put it all out there, and open yourself to public scrutiny. With that said, it’s important to note that if you’re a closed company then your employees and customers are probably already out there in the social media sphere talking about you.

This is where I qualify the first sentence where I talk about there being “almost no place for social media in the closed organization”‘; there’s always plenty of room for “reputation management” or as it was called in the bygone days of yesteryear damage control. However, this part is also likely lost on the closed organization, because they believe that keeping their head down and going with the flow is the best approach, and sometimes it is, a little passive for my taste, but I could see how some might view it as effective, at least from the perspective of ‘if you ignore something it will go away’.

However, I would submit that in the age of social media, or the Web, in general, an organization that tries to live under those old rules is really just signing their own death certificate. It may not happen right away, but like so many great companies that have crumbled, it will happen slowly, until all falls apart, and everyone stands around in the aftermath scratching their heads and asking how this could happen. Yes, it’s a leap from not using social media to an organization’s foundation crumbling, but it becomes less of a leap when the organization has closed up so tightly that they’ve turned their back on their customers.

Reading this Businessweek article makes me think that I am quite sad to see that Yahoo is giving away their search business to Microsoft in the deal announced this week. To be sure, Yahoo has struggled for years as Google has claimed market share, but going over to the dark side and selling out to Microsoft seems sad and unfortunate to me. On the one hand, Yahoo has had a lot of problems, and has lost a lot of money over the years, on the other hand, Microsoft has had a lot of problems with their products over the years, and they’ve made a lot of money. Perhaps it’s a marriage made in heaven, where the bottom line trumps value, but it’s still sad. Yahoo was a Web pioneer, trying new things and attempting to define what the Web could be. However, with this deal, it seems they have thrown in the towel.

It will remain to be seen how things will go for YaBing, or BingHoo, or whatever the combination that adds Yahoo’s search assets to Bing will be called. A lot of folks like to hang their hat on the idea that Bing, somehow, with it’s new interface, and marketing push, is different than Live Search, but really, that’s just advertising dollars at work, because the Microsoft flavor of search is as crummy as it’s always been, and maybe that will change for them with the Yahoo deal. However, I doubt it somehow, because they’ve just never gotten what the Web is about, and I’d submit that Web’s openness is fundamentally incongruent with Microsoft’s culture, and philosophy, thus making it impossible for them ever to get more market share than they can buy… RIP Yahoo – “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

I’ve been waiting for Chris Anderson‘s Free to come out for a while, and I started reading the free version online at Scribd last night. I’ve embedded the complete Scribd version below.

So far I’ve been seeing some great thoughts, some of which I’ve come across in reading Steve Weber’s The Success of Open Source, as well as an oldy-but-a-goody link from when I first brought my music online in 1999 – The Free Music Philosophy.

In reading this book I think of a Seth Godin post called You Should Write an eBook… where he talks about pitching his book Unleashing the IdeaVirus “I brought it to my publisher and said, “I’d like you to publish this, but I want to give it away on the net.”” Because I could read the Scribd version for free I put in an order for a hard copy of the book. If I didn’t know I’d enjoy it, I probably wouldn’t have done that. If I hadn’t had the chance to read it I probably would have continued listening to him as he made the news/interview circuit and forgot about it… So for me the ideas he proposes, while not totally new to me, make sense tied together, and from a business perspective, free makes a lot of sense.

This book has already gotten me thinking about ways that I might make my music available in a similar way…

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Yesterday, in this post, I talked about how if you want to be successful you have to create value, stay centered in the Tao and the rest will follow. Almost immediately after posting that I saw a New York Times alert that announced that Google was launching an operating system. An operating system! Really!!! They’re a search and advertising company, right? Well, not exactly, they’re quite diversified into applications, and cloud computing in general. Anyway, with yesterday’s post fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but think there was Google yet again stepping out of their niche.

This is a brilliant move, here’s why:

People want an alternative to Microsoft – If all netbooks are running some flavor of Microsoft OS then susceptibility to viruses is a huge problem, and a netbook, by it’s very nature is on the Web all the time, so that means you might as well sign up for a life (of the machine) membership with McAfee, Norton, or whomever’s playing that game these days, because with a Microsoft OS you’ll need all the help you can get.

The Mac alternative – for netbooks, there isn’t one.

Linux or something – Nobody wants to buy a netbook with no OS… command prompt takes us back 15 years to when nobody wanted to use computers precisely because of this daunting reality, and native Linux netbooks, so far, haven’t gotten great reviews.

The release of Google’s OS is a case study in what it means to deliver value, keep to the center and be successful. Their following what people need, but not in the classic ‘find a niche and exploit it’ kind of way, rather through  organic means they’re putting it out there opening the code to the open source community, and letting anyone have access to it for free. The value is not just that it’s free, the value is that it’s freely available, and available to be built upon and further refined; as they say on their blog “we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.” This statement is what it means to be at the center and also illustrates that they know what it takes to be a success.

As the Tao Te Ching says, ‘whether you go up the ladder or come down it, it’s still shaky and better to be on the firm ground’… another illustration of the center. Google knows the center, and we need more companies like them.

For many years, I’ve been inspired by the Taoist concept called Wei Wu Wei, doing by not doing. This philosophy can be applied in many ways, but since the focus of this site is digital strategy, let’s focus on that: When you’re doing digital strategy the greatest success is found when you’re working with the Tao, or loosely translated, the unseen current of the universe. If you’re working against the Tao, then somehow, you just won’t succeed, or succeed for very long. Why? Because you can force anything, but forcing, by its very nature infers opposition, or opposing something… many dollars and much energy can be spent to force things, but eventually dollars and energy run out and whatever was being opposed prevails. If you’re working with the Tao, then there’s no need for force, because there’s no opposition.

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…

Seth Godin’s blog is one of the few “personality” blogs I read, and he frequently provides some interesting food for thought; today he had one such post called “Magicians, sausage makers and transparency“. He opens the article positing the question: “Does everything have to become completely transparent?” As a way of countering the corporate transparency buzz of late. He then goes on to ask whether Apple should be transparent about their designs, or if Star Trek should release the script of their next sequel. He then contemplates the art of the magician with transparency and marketing as “story” where a little magic rather than reality (my interpretation) can’t hurt. Then he sums up with a point about playing poker with your cards face up won’t ever allow you to win. Truly good points, and these are good questions. The post certainly begs the question: what are the parameters of openness/transparency?

As I started to answer this question on my blog, I realized that I didn’t know the answer myself. I found myself trying to understand my core belief of why openness/transparency is a good thing. I pulled out my copy of the Tao Te Ching, also read a little Confucius, evaluated the concepts of Capitalism, and the free market economy, as well as the egalitarian philosophy in conjunction with the meritocracy, and I found myself scratching my head without a clear answer.

I’ve always believed that the truth would set you free, and a credo of my own is that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to hide from; these are core beliefs, and so in spite of the vogue period that the concept of transparency is in, I’ve always believed that being open and transparent is just the right way to do things. Therefore, I generally believe that being open and transparent is the right thing to do for a company, a politician, a celebrity or anyone.

That doesn’t mean that you should divulge business plans, design sketches, research knowledge or anything deemed private/personal by the law, but that still leaves many wide open spaces where an organization, or individual can be open and transparent. So when asking the question of whether everything has to be transparent, I would say, no everything doesn’t have to be transparent, but nothings black and white…

Last week Jeremiah Owyang posted a great article talking about free WiFi in hotels, and frankly, I couldn’t agree with him more. Another dimension to this is the car dealer. I’ve been looking at buying a new car for a few months now, and I finally reached that point where I needed to go to the car dealer and start putting together the deal. I had all of my materials set up on my on mobile data center (read: my iBook) and stashed in my bag. I decided that I would have everything set up for reference, CARFAX, Consumer Reports, Loan approvals, Interest rates calculators, etc… I assumed that no car dealer would have free WiFi, thus empowering the customer to have the same resources that they had, on the ready. I was wrong.

As the discussions started, and then the negotiations became heated, I decided it was time to unsheath the mobile data center. I set up on my lap and started citing my numbers and references. The car dealer wasn’t prepared for the prepared customer, so I got a straight deal, as outlined in my Consumer Reports info, which would have been more like me paying sticker had I not been prepared, which is horribly inflated.

Anyway, this is less about my good deal and what it took to get there, and more about how advantageous the Web can be for the customer in historically closed  situations. With ubiquitous and free WiFi (which, slowly but surely, is on its way) and the cheaper netbooks that are hitting the market, all customers can be empowered, thus having the same tools as the folks trying to sell them.

The way business is being done is changing. The old era of pressure, emotional purchases, and psychological games to close the deal is coming to a close (Gelber’s written an interesting book on this dimension here, Horse Trading In the Age of Cars). Where the Web leveled the playing field for communications, it’s also creating an environment of open information to educate consumers… What will open access to information mean for you and your business?

With all of the hype that’s going around right now about Bing potentially knocking Google of the search mountain, I felt that this article was very timely; and yet another story that talks about open and transparent is better than closed and opaque. This is the story of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The article, by Michael Calore taken from the This Day in Tech pages at Wired.com: June 5, 2002: Browser, Philosophy Born of Turmoil, Defeat.