..when companies care less about profit and more about doing something good for the community.
On April 2, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Death by Smiley Face: When Rivals Disdain Profit”. It talked about how all these new Web companies came into being to provide a great and much needed service to the Web community and focus on doing it well, rather than turning a profit.
It brought me back many years, when Gmail was first launched with 2 GB of free space in it. At the time, Yahoo was selling via yearly fee 1 GB of mail space. Yahoo became almost neurotic in anxiety about it! I was amazed. After all, Google, their biggest rival in search was about to threaten a huge premium service revenue stream by offering something that many people were paying for….for FREE – and then some!
And now, according to this NY Times article, many other examples exist where companies will provide a great service but not have profit generation as a primary goal. It certainly provides an interesting point of disruption to new Web businesses, and old traditional businesses too.
I thought back to one thought I had during that Gmail 2 GB/Yahoo Mail 1 GB for a fee time. And that was: What if Google were to offer everything that Yahoo had for free? What if everything Yahoo did for profit, or any other company on the Web for that matter, was, all of a sudden, available for free AND the service was as good or better? What if a whole population of users suddenly flocked to these free services and the profits of Yahoo dropped preciptiously, as well as many other Web companies? My fear was that with the profits from search marketing, Google could have stuck it out much longer than any competitor by offering their services for free and killed every company whose livelihood depended on profits generated from those very services that Google decided to put up for free.
And now with the Web 2.0 way of doing things, you can build pretty complex stuff for almost no cost at all. So two guys in a garage can truly put up something that would have taken many (expensive but talented) engineers to write from scratch.
So tell me, what if everything on the Net were available for free?