As I look for new products to use in my day job it seems I am having the same conversation on a daily basis. It’s usually one between me and a Web2.0 company. And it always goes something like this:
Web2.0 company: We want to provide you this service for free.
Me: I want to pay. Really. Please. Let me pay.
I recently had this conversation with Alan over at BrightKite, when he asked if a text messaging service was something we’d be willing to pay for. I’m not sure if I answered fast enough. “Yes. Please. Charge us for it. We want to pay.”
Not that I have the budget to burn. It’s just that – for reasons I just can’t understand – free is a harder sell.
While I personally refuse to pay any subscription fee to use any service/application online, the enterprise is a whole different ball game and there are valid concerns for the distrust of free services.
If they’re giving the service away, the belief is that they are not making any money (of course we know they get revenue through ads, though it’s still hard to make that case even with the newspaper analogy, because after all, you still pay for newspapers, never mind that advertising revenues are much bigger). And if they’re not charging for the service they are more likely to go under than a company that charges for services. So while the enterprise is willing to use Web2.0 companies for non-critical things (they’re critical to me as a marketer but not so to others: wikis, blogs, etc), it is an uphill battle trying to convince the enterprise to switch on other things, like say, project management software, billing-related/invoice apps or CRM.
Maybe it’s me being naive, but I’m not sure when the word “free” became synonymous to “unreliable” or “un-secure.” Ok fine. There is that saying “you get what you pay for.” But with all the great applications and services in the Web2.0 space these days, that saying seem to apply less and less.
You can try to explain the Google model all you want and it will be a waste of breath. They’d tell you that free is ok for personal e-mail. But not for enterprise data.
And maybe this is why there are so many social networking and social bookmarking and social everything and not the “real” business applications are a little slower at catching on to Web2.0. No wonder there are those who still think Web2.0 is all about horsing around on YouTube, Twitter, Second Life and MySpace. Nevermind that there are really cool business apps out there like TimeX, Wrike and others. (Which might also explain why, while more than capable of larger-scale use, they are marketed more towards the individual user).
It’s a tougher sell, I guess. Which really doesn’t make sense at all. Software is just a tool, and in a perfect world, choosing the service provider (people) should be more important than the application used to render the service.
Too many times I see companies choose a service provider because of the software they use instead of their quality of service when it should be the other way around.
It’s like buying an uber cool cell phone that’s rendered useless because of poor coverage.
Not that paid applications are superior over free ones, which I totally disagree. I think by insisting on using paid business software the enterprise is losing out on the uber cool software that results from constant user feedback. Not that paid services don’t get constant user feedback, without going into several theories here, I’ll just say that true Web2.0 users feel the need to contribute through feedback.
I’m getting dizzy thinking about what I just wrote. I think I’m gonna stop here. If anyone is reading this please feel free to enlighten and straighten me out.
