Kevin Kelly's must-read article on what's "better than free"

Required reading for anyone who creates products, services, or media of any kind today: Kevin Kelly describes how the digital economy will soon work. (This nicely complements the message in Bit Literacy that "bits are essentially infinite" and need to be managed as such.)

[T]he previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

(This is not far from Hurst's Law: "Any unbounded bitstream tends to irrelevance.")

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned...

From there Kevin goes on to list eight "generatives," or features, that he argues are "better than free." These are the building blocks of new products and services and they're worth studying, sharing, memorizing, drilling your team on:

• immediacy (getting the bits now)
• personalization (bits tailored to your own preferences)
• interpretation (for-pay services that operate on the free bits)
• authenticity (any hint of "realness" in the virtual world)
• accessibility (getting to the bits on any device, not just your home computer)
• embodiment (higher-resolution bits)
• patronage (feel-good process of supporting the bits' creators)
• findability (the new version of distribution: drawing users' attention)

I'd add one other feature, simplicity, which allows users to engage the bits with a minimum of user interface annoyances interfering with the experience. (For example, this is a major reason why Google took an early commanding lead in the search business: Yahoo and the other search engines packed too many distractions in the search experience. By the time they realized the strategic importance of a good customer experience, it was too late - Google had won.)

The only other thing missing from Kevin's outstanding colunm is that nagging downside of the digital economy: the sheer amount of information that is overloading people today. Most people don't know even how to manage their email today; how they'll survive these other bitstreams, as valuable as they may be, will be interesting to watch.

Finally, Kevin accurately points out that all these "better than free" patterns will apply beyond the digital world:

Even material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill. We pay for Authenticity and Immediacy in drugs. Someday we'll pay for Personalization.

If you want to get yourself or your team ready for these changes, a good way to start is by reading Bit Literacy.

• Feb 1, 2008
• IN: Bit Literacy
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