
Free works - mh_
http://www.marco.org/2013/03/19/free-works
======
ender7
All right, so I have a slight bone to pick with Marco. This is actually a
fairly well-written article and I'm glad that people are engaging with it
elsewhere in the comments, but I'm just a bit confused that he's choosing to
write it _now_ , and about Google Reader than about, say, Reading List.
Remember? That product that Apple released for free and that was a direct
competitor to Instapaper? Or iCloud, that product that Apple released for free
and that was a direct competitor to Dropbox? Or Ping, that product that Apple
released for free and then shitcanned after not enough people used it?

Marco's response to Reading List (and its integration into not only OS X but
iOS) wasn't "this is predatory pricing! Regulate!" but instead "this might be
good for my product" [1].

So, I don't really know. I didn't use Reader, but I understand that people are
upset that it's getting cancelled. That does suck. Of course, this is
apparently what everyone deserves for daring to use a free product? But
actually it's okay because we'll all be better off because of the great RSS
reader renaissance that is upon us? Oh god I can't keep this straight any
more. Go find a new RSS reader. RSS appears to have weathered the predation of
Facebook, Twitter, and G+ admirably so far; I doubt that its days are
numbered.

[1] <http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper>

~~~
wonderzombie
It sounds to me like you are imputing motives unsupported by this particular
example.

First, Marco pretty explicitly said he wasn't in favor of regulation:

    
    
        Much of our rapid progress wouldn’t have happened if we had to play by the rest of the world’s rules, and I think we’re better off overall the way it is.
    

In general, it's pretty even-handed on this particular issue:

    
    
       The best thing we can do isn’t necessarily to try to pay for everything, which is unrealistic and often not an option. Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures.
    

Second, it sounds complex because it _is_ complex. He's pretty explicitly
addressing the "you're not the customer" canard, as if that's a panacea. In
reality it is a trade-off, and paid vs. free is possibly even orthogonal,
given the last paragraph.

~~~
tunesmith
I agree with orthogonal. I see it as a 2x2 grid: free($), paid vs open,
closed.

free/open: no problem if you have altruistic developers

free/closed: seems great, but problems can happen (google)

paid/closed: generally works, vulnerable to predatory pricing

paid/open: lots of companies experimenting with this model

~~~
fpgeek
paid/open: vulnerable to a race to the bottom as the open alternatives
undercut each other on price

~~~
pgebhard
And that's bad for the customer how?

~~~
wonderzombie
It might be good for the customer at first. In the long term, though, it's not
difficult to imagine cheap -> free -> monoculture -> square one.

IOW it's good for the customer right up until the One True Product is shut
down, or there's no viable business model anymore.

~~~
tunesmith
I'm not sure how an _open_ monoculture is square one. If it becomes less than
ideal to anyone, they can just fork it. Plus, you can't really shut down an
open "One True Product" if someone can just use the open materials to start it
up again.

The risk seems to be more in the camp of the company. If it's open, someone
could undercut them more easily than if it was closed. So the onus is placed
more on the ability of the company to continually add value through services
or the kind of innovation that led to the product in the first place, rather
than just protecting their IP.

------
tolmasky
I see no difference between Google Reader shutting down and Apple abandoning
the Mac Pro.

This has nothing to do with free: it has to do with a failed product like any
other, plain and simple. People don't see Google Reader as a failed product
because they like it and "a lot of people use it". But that "a lot" is in
absolute terms, not relative ones. The reality is that not enough people use
RSS for it to matter at Google scale. Even if everyone currently using it were
to start paying for it tomorrow, it would be a drop in the bucket of Google
profits. Reader had it's chance, and it failed to get enough traction, period.
The "free" part is just a distraction in this conversation, Reader makes no
sense as a product for Google at any (reasonable) price. This story would have
gone down exactly the same had Google offered reader at a price that matched
the other competitors at the time: they probably still would have won, and
still would have ended up shutting it down.

This is exactly the same as how having the Mac Pro line would be incredibly
lucrative for you or me, but it just doesn't matter for Apple. The margins are
through the roof on that thing, and in a lot of ways its quite possibly the
perfect product: a 3 year old machine that commands the same price it did 3
years ago. But again, not enough people _want_ it for it to matter at Apple
scale. If Apple could double the price and maintain the same sale numbers of
the Mac Pro, it still wouldn't be worth it for them.

If anything, we should see this as a really healthy market correction. Its
good for Google to realize that this isn't worth their time so they can focus
their resources on things only they can do (like cars that drive themselves
and whatnot) and leave these tasks for the rest of us where these user numbers
and profits _are_ meaningful.

~~~
youngerdryas
You can still buy a Mac Pro. Google could have had Reader live on because they
are, you know, "open". Except they want everyone to use Google+.

~~~
tolmasky
What does this have to do with anything? Google is a business like any other.
Google is not dropping Reader because they are secretly closed and nefarious,
they are dropping it because no one uses it (again, relatively speaking). If
people actually used RSS then they'd feel compelled to keep it, whether priced
or not, because it would be make business sense to keep it around. I guarantee
you that if RSS had Facebook's user count, they'd be banging that RSS drum
like crazy.

But it doesn't, and Google is not a charity. Whether you believe them to be
"open" or not (meaningless statement), being "open" certainly does not commit
you to supporting arbitrary protocols indefinitely for the good of the world,
especially ones that most people don't use. RSS had its shot, it just can't
compete in today's web.

And we'll see for just how long you can still buy the Mac Pro.

~~~
youngerdryas
Look I like Google and I understand they have to run a business but I have a
hard time believing that shuttering Reader has nothing to do with driving
people to G+.

~~~
tolmasky
I guess you are not understanding my position. I neither like nor don't like
Google, and I'm not "defending" their position from an altruistic standpoint.
Maybe their plan is to help G+ through shutting down Reader, I don't know. My
point is that if they did that, it wouldn't be a testament for or against
their openness, because Reader merited being shut down either way, for the
simple fact that it is a failed technology.

If you strongly want "open" to beat "closed social", then maybe RSS dying
might be a step in a positive direction, since its had its shot, and proved to
just not be useful for people. Now, I personally feel RSS neither hurts nor
helps "closed social" in any way, so I think its inconsequential.

~~~
youngerdryas
Well you may have a point about RSS being a failed technology, at least for
the masses, who seem to prefer bells and whistles.

------
cromwellian
I agree with the article in many respects, but I find there's a giant blind
spot that needs addressing given the author.

I don't understand how Marco can't view Apple as a proprietary monoculture,
and one that is somewhat worse in the sense that you can't clone the features
of it without being sued (what if Reader had patents covering it and sued if
you tried to create a clone?)

Apple frequently force upgrades users and develoeprs, some would say by
planned obsolescence. For example, early on in IOS, people built apps that
allowed in-app purchases and subscriptions, because Apple had no API for them,
so we had a federated, open system for that feature. Then Apple changed their
T&C and mandate use of Apple infrastructure to do this, and people now have to
resort to hacks (remember Dropbox getting banned because of a link to sign
up?) Slowly, the apps were forced onto Apple monoculture services.

Basically, when Apple introduces monoculture, it is viewed as a good. It
simplifies user experience, etc. But for everyone else, it's somehow bad and
evil.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I'd argue that a lot of us in the "Apple fan community," including Marco,
understand that there are negatives to Apple's approach to, well, nearly
everything. It's apparently very easy for people to pick up on the approval we
give Apple while glossing over the criticism, I suspect in part because we
don't tend to see iOS's locked-down nature as the existential crisis that,
well, Hacker News readers tend to sometimes see -- and because we don't see a
problem with something that they see as a deal-breaker, then, well, we must
_never_ say anything bad about Apple. In fact, we often do.

Having said that, there's at least a _practical_ difference in the kind of
"monoculture" that the iOS App Store represents and the kind of monoculture
that Google Reader represented: while Apple may change the terms, it's highly
unlikely they'd ever make the App Store just _go away._ I'm not sure there are
any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed
because of a change in Apple's TOS rather than for a violation that they
should have been aware of when they submitted it. There are some high-profile
cases of stupid rejections, to be sure, but that's not the same thing.

And, it's at least worth noting that a major difference there is that Apple
_derives revenue_ from their services. Say what you will about them, but
that's a pretty good incentive to not just take their ball and go home. Google
Reader didn't bring in any revenue, and that's what ultimately doomed it. (as
in beer) _does_ work, but not indefinitely.

~~~
fpgeek
> I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store
> and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS

Well, at the very least, the removal gun has been pointed at a lot of
commercial apps when Apple has decided to "re-interpret" the TOS.

For instance, it used to be standard practice to kick someone out to your
website to buy an ebook (i.e. the appropriate alternative to IAP). Over the
course of several months, it became a TOS violation.

Apps that required an external subscription used to include sign-up links on
their login screen. Now they don't.

How many commercial apps were hit by the Apple's app store programming
language restriction?

Or, if we're including the Mac App Store, how many apps and developers have
left it over sandboxing?

Yes, Apple isn't likely to shut down their app store completely. But, whenever
they want, they can (and might sometimes do) kill a part of it that you care
about, for their own internal reasons.

------
dreamdu5t
An entrepreneur is sent to jail for selling widgets. Upon arrival he meets two
other businessmen who are locked-up. He asks them, "Why are you here?"

The first guy responds, "I sold widgets for more than anyone else, and they
jailed me for excessive profits."

The second guy responds, "I sold widgets at the same price as everyone else,
and they jailed me for price collusion."

They ask him, "What'd you do?"

The entrepeneur responds, "I sold widgets for lower than anyone else, so they
jailed me for predatory pricing!"

~~~
shadowfox
I must confess that this went over my head :( What were you implying, if you
would care to explain?

~~~
dreamdu5t
The article accuses Google of "predatory pricing" and my story is meant to
illustrate that any price can be seen as monopolist, collusive, or predatory,
and that laws against such things are misguided and reactionary.

I might be paraphrasing the story wrong. It's a folk story amongst economists
about the absurdity of antitrust regulation. I'm not sure who originated it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Criticism>

------
kurtvarner
Some solid points here, but I gotta disagree with this one...

 _If a product grows huge quickly, which almost always requires it to be free,
it will probably be acquired for a lot of money. Free products that don’t grow
quickly enough can usually die with an “acquihire”, which lets everyone save
face and ensures that the investors get something out of the deal._

I think this way of thinking is the product of a very frothy market over the
last few years. Now, I'm not one to scream series A crunch from the mountain
tops, but it's unrealistic to think that thousands of these startups that
"don't grow quickly enough" will be acquihired. In 2012 Google and Facebook
combined to make 21 acquisitions. That doesn't put much of a dent in the
number of failing startups. And with the Formspring shutdown announcement last
week, it seems that even companies that have achieved impressive scale (30M
users in since 2010) cannot rely on being bought.

~~~
pflats
I don't know enough about how things went to agree or disagree. I'm still
amazed at how many "aqui-hires" there are in the industry. How many companies
that have made it to a solid Series A round have fallen flat on their face?

Formspring seems like a red herring to me; everything I heard about it in the
real world (as a high-school teacher) was toxic. Of all the online bullying
issues I had to deal with, more involved Formspring than even Facebook. The
anonymous thing was a double-edged sword.

------
mustpax
The analogy to predatory pricing doesn't work because in the brick and mortar
world, you drive out your competitors so that you may _raise your prices_. So
the price is said to be artificially lowered.

In the software world, free software products _stay free_ even after they have
become the dominant platform. The price is not artificially lowered to zero;
at scale the cost of operating a free service is lower than the advertising
revenue generated by it. This is actually the "natural" price for the product.

~~~
wmf
Facebook effectively raised prices via promoted posts. Google Apps is no
longer free. These may be exceptions, though.

------
ruswick
Rarely if ever do I find myself in agreement with Marco, but he articulates a
valid point quite well. Monopolies and effective monopolies are obviously
quite detrimental to the web, especially when they fail.

But, there is little that can be done about the tendency for monopolies to
emerge within the web ecosystem, only to fail. If companies were to charge or
advertise heavily from day one, it would effectively preclude any sort of
viral, meteoric rise, because the overwhelming number of prospective users
would turn their nose up at it. Most companies would never achieve widespread
success. On the other hand, a lack of an organized business strategy leaves
companies scrambling to devise revenue sources, as is happening with Facebook
and their absurd gift card thing. Either one can try to make money and be
relegated to obscurity, or one can become popular and end up exasperated at
their inability to make money. There is very little opportunity to become both
wildly successful and fiscally viable; that is why most companies fail.

As a user, I would prefer a lack of business model to a lack of a business:
better to have an RSS reader (or social network, or mail client/to-do app)
that lacks substancial income for 8 years than one with a direct business
model that never gets off the ground.

------
yawn
"Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures."

Like the App Store?

~~~
roc
And this is really where I have an issue with people posing the proprietary
nature of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, et al as "A Problem".

People throw their content into these services, time and again. Often doing so
_as_ they're suffering whatever pain we hypothesize is implicit in leaving a
prior service. (However much pain it did or did not cause, to have everyone's
stuff locked up in a MySpace silo, it did not stop anyone from putting all
their stuff right back into Facebook's silo.)

And they do this in other contexts: no-one much frets about proprietary saved-
game file formats. Or the release of new console platforms that end support
for entire libraries of games. So clearly there's a line.

And it seems a reasonable one to draw. Because who _really_ cares about their
old saved games, or a game they hadn't played, or mobile app they hadn't so
much as launched, in months?

It's certainly _nice_ as things approach the open/internet ideal. But there's
clearly an entire class of computing where people do cost/benefit
considerations with an emphasis on immediate entertainment value, rather than
long-term computing value.

And people have repeatedly demonstrated a desire to treat social networks more
like consoles than even mobile platforms, let alone PC computing platforms.

So why do geeks persist in seeing "A Problem" here? Let alone a problem that,
if solved, would garner any attention for having presented a solution?

------
blndcat
Not sure why there isn't more of a discussion going on, given the uproar over
Reader, I found the whole article insightful but especially the end. The
concluding 3 paragraphs are like the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense.

~~~
cbs
_The concluding 3 paragraphs are like the twist at the end of The Sixth
Sense._

Yup. This guy did a fantastic job articulating what many others have just
given up on trying to. Those of us who voice trepidation are usually
marginalized as jealous and/or haters. See: <http://xkcd.com/743/>

------
pbreit
OP is trying to make it seem like offering web services for free is rule-
breaking or even borderline illegal. This is not so. It is not predatory
pricing to price something at its marginal cost (which for web services is
near-zero).

The OP also seems to be unaware of TV, radio, etc.

~~~
lmm
It's predatory to price something below the level that's possible for a viable
independent business. It's bad for customers in tech for exactly the same
reasons as in any other industry.

/used to work for a business that had to compete with twilio.

~~~
pbreit
That's a definition that suits your view but is not commonly shared. The item
typically needs to be sold below cost and there needs to be intent to drive
out competitors. Neither is true here.

~~~
pinaceae
? if you give something away that a loss because it actually costs money to
produce/provide, like Google did with the Reader service - it doesn't fit the
definition?

what a crazy piece of logic.

google destroyed the market for smaller RSS-app vendors by providing a service
for free, at a loss. was it on purpose? or just stupidity? what exactly does
it change? the ecosystem around RSS has been ruined, maybe beyond repair.

because open and don't be evil and blah.

~~~
king_jester
> google destroyed the market for smaller RSS-app vendors by providing a
> service for free, at a loss. was it on purpose? or just stupidity? what
> exactly does it change? the ecosystem around RSS has been ruined, maybe
> beyond repair.

This is surely a joke, because the last time I checked software of my choosing
can pluck RSS feeds and serve me content, whether it be a web, desktop, or
mobile app. While the current quality of RSS apps can be argued, RSS is in no
way near dead.

------
tunesmith
I think this argument is disorganized. It reads as if he's arguing for free in
favor of paid (which I don't really agree with), but I think he's actually
arguing for open in favor of closed (which I do agree with).

The predatory pricing thing is a problem for a lot of people. I've most
recently come across it with a friend trying to start his graphic-design
business who was upset about discovering that "99 designs" website. Before
that it was a bass player for our band that was strenuously principled that we
should never accept a gig "for exposure", and should also not play with
musicians that had a history of accepting free gigs, since it was
"disrespectful" to the players that were trying to make a living at it. While
I do agree that there are moderating counterpoints to both, they do bring up
relevant concerns.

Meanwhile, you have Radiohead and Nine-Inch-Nails, both of whom experimented
with releasing their music for free way back when. When it "worked", everyone
championed how it was the way forward for the music industry - how music was a
"service", how the recordings should be loss-leader marketing expenses for the
paid service of live performances. Overlooking the people who were more
focused on the recording side of things, and the fact that those two bands had
built-in fanbases. Years later, both bands are moving on from the "free"
model, while so many people are misguidedly releasing their tracks for free
that indie songwriters are _paying_ money to even get their signed-up fans to
listen to their new tracks.

I'm not so sure that the conclusion is that free works, as it is accepting
that free works by being predatory and that there can be consequences that
hurt others. And it isn't exactly ethical to accept a negative consequence on
behalf of someone else. This is not to say that going free is _wrong_ \-
sometimes there is a bigger picture that might make it worthwhile for all (for
instance, many open source techs that have created new marketplaces that have
enabled many people to make a living). But the argument does not reduce down
to something as simple as free works, therefore free is good.

~~~
roc
> _"I think this argument is disorganized. It reads as if he's arguing for
> free in favor of paid (which I don't really agree with), but I think he's
> actually arguing for open in favor of closed (which I do agree with)."_

That was my thought. He opened by talking about Free, because Reader closing
and Mailbox being acquired stirred up a lot of the usual anti-Free-Service
backlash. And he discusses free, I think, just to underline that it _does_
work.

But I think he went into the weeds (and clearly lost much of the readership
there) in discussing _why_. Which is strange, as I don't think even the anti-
Free crowd takes issue with _whether_ Free works and they certainly seem to
all understand that it _does_ work.

And, ultimately, the "why" part is irrelevant to where he winds up, which is
simply that open protocols should be preferred to proprietary ones.

------
MatthewPhillips
I don't usually upvote Marco.org articles but this one was very good. Before
Reader there was a vibrant (niche, but vibrant) market for RSS readers. Reader
decimated that market and arguably killed innovation in RSS altogether. I
remember when PubSubHubBub and RSS Cloud came out and wondered why anyone
would bother implementing them for feeds when all that mattered was if Google
Reader was fetching your stuff fast enough (it was).

It's going to be interesting to see how things develop in the wake of the
shutdown. There's already a mad rush to provide alternatives, and a bunch of
open source readers are in heavy development (I'm using Selfoss personally:
<https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss>). It might turn out that Reader shutting
down is the best thing that could have happened.

------
icebraining
It's because of people like Marco Arment, offering their written content for
predatory pricing, that the newspaper industry is going bankrupt.

Let's illegalize free blogs!

~~~
wmf
That really gave me a laugh, considering that Arment runs The Magazine.

------
niklas_a00
"Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures."
Said the man who makes a magazine that only works on iPads and loves
developing for a platform controlled by one single company in California that
is prone to suppressing political content or apps that might compete with its
own. Nice.

~~~
glasshead969
Minor correction : Magazine now works on web too if you have a subscription.

------
tlogan
And, after WebDav and RSS, IMAP support for Gmail will become "insufficient to
support great new features" so it will be decommissioned in favor of a great
new API. Just wait...

------
benackles
Free works, but for whom? Certainly a lot of companies are doing well by
giving away everything, but how long will the acquihire exit strategy remain
open? Furthermore, the user is getting absolutely screwed. There have been a
lot of notable services that have popped up over the last few years and then
some big company came in to pick up the talent and dumped the product and
subsequently its users.

I've been fortunate to only get screwed twice, first with Gowalla and now with
Google Reader. Although I used Google Reader for longer and much more
frequently than Gowalla, in a way I feel less screwed (if at all) by Google.
Google Reader is a very portable product by its natural connection to RSS.
Google has also taken a few important steps towards making data portable for
it's millions of users.

It took less than a minute to transfer to another service. I'm testing out
Feedly for now, but I would rather host my own RSS reader and take control
myself. If a consumer product provides adequate data portability the idea of
hosting my content for me is something I feel perfectly comfortable doing.

My point is its less concerning that everything is free, but more how anti-
competitive these services are with my data. If I can at any moment retain
control and back up everything or move it over to a competing service, I'm
okay with investing time in adopting a free service.

However, moving your data between services as they inevitably shutdown does
seem like a short term fix. I think Marco's idea for a mirror of the reader
API is a great long term solution[1]. For the average user, people would
probably opt for a popular host. For people who want to host it themselves
(probably a minority), they could do so with ease.

[1] [http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-
google-...](http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-
reader)

------
mikemoka
Lower costs in this market are also something that makes open source possible,
I just found two opensource projects inspired by Google Reader and hosted on
Google Code, what do you think of them?

<http://selfoss.aditu.de/>

<http://gobblerss.pommepause.com/screenshot.html>

------
nickswan
Apps like Feedly and NewsBlur were managing to survive before the Google
Reader announcement. If you build something good, and market it well, with
niche like features - enough people will be happy to pay for it to keep you
and the product going.

------
angryasian
I think author fails to recognize paid services that eventually fail because
of the barrier is never able to become a sustainable business. Wouldn't it be
worse by paying for something then losing it ? There are plenty of free
offerings that are able to become sustainable businesses through various
business models. I think the distinction is rather the choices of the founder
+ acceleration of growth vs paid / free model.

edit:

Every business that deals with some sort of digital goods today has to compete
with free.. music, movies, games, etc. So maybe we should all just sit around
and say how unfair it is rather than to figure out how to compete. Its a
completely ridiculous argument

------
elomarns
The golden rule is there's no golden rules.

Everything can work, and everything has its advantages and flaws. You just
need to know where you're, and have a strategy to succeed based on your
business model.

------
orangethirty
Writing software is not cheap, or even close to free. Even if you can host it
for a low price, there are still other associated costs that people ever talk
about. Mostly the time spent trying to win the freemium lottery (and getting
acquihired).

------
eloisant
Sparrow.

Not free, acqui-hire, shut down.

Again, as a user paying for a service doesn't protect you from having it shut
down.

------
caycep
the one thing that i haven't seen mentioned, in all this chatter about how
"RSS is dead" -

RSS feeds are free in both beer and speech, and were likely authored (or co-
authored) by Aaron Swartz to be that way. The Google Pluses of the world, not
so much...

------
downrightmike
Stop bitching about reader please.

