Malcolm Gladwell debunks Free

Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Free by Chris Anderson in The New Yorker is an entertaining and enlightening read - http://bit.ly/Dzfsm.

Here are my favorite quotes.

In reference to YouTube’s enormous infrastructure and delivery costs:
Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number.

In reference to Anderson’s discussion of nuclear energy’s de minimus fuel costs, which ignore the underlying infrastructure requirements:
This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.

In reference to Anderson’s claim that all information wants to be free:
Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.