No Free Lunch
The future of zero pricing
In "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of "The Long Tail," discusses the rise of free business models. The underlying economics of digital services make zero pricing far more widespread than in the analog world. Free business models, whether for digital products or tangible goods, are based on cross subsidy. The "freemium" model -- an increasingly popular business model online -- appears to offer the elusive free lunch. Many millions of Skype users, for instance, making voice and video calls over the Internet, pay nothing at all, subsidized by a smaller group of customers who pay for additional functionality. The free service is a loss leader (and cheap marketing) for premium paid services.
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Google disruptive impact
Google has had a dramatic impact on a variety of industries, with enormous economic consequences.
Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and chief executive, expects that one day Google will be a $100 billion enterprise. Being the gatekeeper for the world's information turns out to be a lucrative business, especially without the expense of creating any of it. In "Googled," New Yorker writer Ken Auletta explains how Google so rapidly grew from Silicon Valley start-up to global behemoth, and discusses some of the implications.
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The music industry meets the Web

The decline of the record labels in the digital world.
In "Appetite for Self-Destruction," Steve Knopper, a Rolling Stone contributing editor,criticizes the music industry for its failure to adept its strategy to the changing technological environment, and  for its legendary excesses. Not so long ago, the rise of the Internet was expected to be a massive opportunity for the music industry. But this golden age never arrived.
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