Freeloading as value creation
Nick Carr introduced a paper about measuring the value of free users of a product. I haven't gotten a chance to read the entire piece of work but it's definitely worth checking out. The gist of the paper: free users bring value to the table just like paying customers bring money. Of course, open source companies are finding this to be more true by the day as they witness value sprout from communities consisting of volunteers, anonymous contributors and non-paying users. As is anyone else who is tracking what's happening in the industry (myself included). Nonetheless, kudos to the trio of Sunil Gupta, Carl Mela, and Jose Vidal-Sanz who authored the paper...I'm definitely going to take some time over the weekend to read it more closely.
Also, Matt over at Infoworld has a couple of interesting followup posts about this subject and more.
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