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We're still just beginning to exploit atomic-scale effects in revolutionary new materials — semiconductors processing power , ferromagnetic compounds storage , and fiber optics bandwidth. In the arc of history, all three substances are still new, and we have a lot to learn about them. We are just a few decades into the discovery of a new world. What does this mean for the notion of free? Well, just take one example. Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage.
Just in case that wasn't totally clear, that's "unlimited" as in "infinite. And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case. For good reason: It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth YouTube: free and processing power Google: free in the race to the bottom.
Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing. One of the old jokes from the late-'90s bubble was that there are only two numbers on the Internet: infinity and zero. The first, at least as it applied to stock market valuations, proved false. But the second is alive and well. The Web has become the land of the free.
The result is that we now have not one but two trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy.
The first is the extension of King Gillette's cross-subsidy to more and more industries. Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set. Ryanair, for instance, has disrupted its industry by defining itself more as a full-service travel agency than a seller of airline seats see "How Can Air Travel Be Free?
The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. There's nothing new about technology's deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics.
When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics things get more expensive each year switched to software economics things get cheaper.
So, too, for everything from banking to gambling. The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination. Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever-increasing computing power.
Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the s to approximately 0. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to "waste" transistors. Scenario 2: Ads on the subway? That's so 20th century. By sponsoring the whole line and making trips free, the local merchants association brings grateful commuters to neighborhood shops. Waste is a dirty word, and that was especially true in the IT world of the s.
An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. In the glass-walled facilities of the mainframe era, these systems operators exercised their power by choosing whose programs should be allowed to run on the costly computing machines. Their role was to conserve transistors, and they not only decided what was worthy but also encouraged programmers to make the most economical use of their computer time.
As a result, early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to user interface. This was the era of the command line, and the only conceivable reason someone might have wanted to use a computer at home was to organize recipe files. In fact, the world's first personal computer, a stylish kitchen appliance offered by Honeywell in , came with integrated counter space.
And here was Mead, telling programmers to embrace waste. They scratched their heads — how do you waste computer power? Rather than conserve transistors for core processing functions, he developed a computer concept — the Dynabook — that would frivolously deploy silicon to do silly things: draw icons, windows, pointers, and even animations on the screen. The purpose of this profligate eye candy? Ease of use for regular folks, including children.
Kay's work on the graphical user interface became the inspiration for the Xerox Alto, and then the Apple Macintosh, which changed the world by opening computing to the rest of us. We, in turn, found no shortage of things to do with it; tellingly, organizing recipes was not high on the list. Of course, computers were not free then, and they are not free today. But what Mead and Kay understood was that the transistors in them — the atomic units of computation — would become so numerous that on an individual basis, they'd be close enough to costless that they might as well be free.
That meant software writers, liberated from worrying about scarce computational resources like memory and CPU cycles, could become more and more ambitious, focusing on higher-order functions such as user interfaces and new markets such as entertainment. And that meant software of broader appeal, which brought in more users, who in turn found even more uses for computers. Thanks to that wasteful throwing of transistors against the wall, the world was changed.
What's interesting is that transistors or storage, or bandwidth don't have to be completely free to invoke this effect. At a certain point, they're cheap enough to be safely disregarded. The Greek philosopher Zeno wrestled with this concept in a slightly different context.
In Zeno's dichotomy paradox, you run toward a wall. As you run, you halve the distance to the wall, then halve it again, and so on.
But if you continue to subdivide space forever, how can you ever actually reach the wall?
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