See what you make of our new approach to freemium. We’ve come up with a free pass system for the premium features in our time and mileage tracking software. http://blog.1daylater.com/post/430390913/the-wondaylater-golden-ticket It’s essentially a replacement for the classic 30-day trial type approach

Paul

If Apple build cars you would have use their gas stations.

And Sun just made bad products nobody wanted.

Apple is expensive to get into, but even more expensive to get out of.

Without Openness the internet wouldn’t exist PERIOD No real innovation happens when every vendor builds his own ecosystem. It just won’t work. Open systems will always win in the long run. I will get back to you in 10 years and we will see how big the closed Apple-like ecosystems are.

And of course I like to rent movies and buy Apps on the Itunes-Store. Because I trust Apple. I do not trust the Telekom, Sony, Microsoft … they disappointed me far to often. Actuallay there are only three companies I have the trust to paid them: Amazon, Apple and Paypal.

And I think you missed some points.

# Apple already moved towards openness, when put unter pressure: DRM-free MP3s.

# Don’t forget the Safari on the Iphone, Ipad … and the growing opinion that you should develop HTML5
Apps optimzed for Apples Gadgets than Apps.

# Don’t forget, that Apple has worked hard for their current position: They used the success of the Iphone to implement Itunes at users Computer. They used that success to push the Iphone into the market. The used the Iphone and Itunes to implement the App-Store … and now the Success of the App-Store, will support the Ipad – this is an extraordinary complex chain of success an on one point the could as well have had bad luck. I’m not sure, that another company will come up with a compareable story soon. So I am sceptic about your conclusion for the future of IT.

# I think you know my Opinion about Facebook … we’re going to seem them fall like AOL and Myspace.

# I don’t think that innivation needs that much capital … acually the success of most of the things in the web, shows, that the initial costs of innovation have droped to a point where you can innovate from your college dorm, actually with a few nightshifts.

Great Tip…

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I don’t think, that Google is fighting a battle there. It’s more like throwing propaganda flyers from a plane over an enemy city. And it works. It’s not like ten years ago, when some Nerd told you that Emacs, Latex and a few hunderd Keyboard-Shortcuts are better than Word. Employees know Gmail and Google Docs from their private life. And you have a hard time explaining them, why they should use some UI-Disaster, 90ies Application at Work, especially at Work, while they can use easier, more advanced Applications, for free and everywhere.

If Google manages to attract only a few alphageeks for their Google-OS-Gadget, they have another disruptive, convincing and selfreplicating effect on their other products.

1. “You have to understand and trust the concept of storing your digital stuff on somebody else’s servers.” Actually you don’t have to. You may also save all the stuff on your own Webspace. With CMSes like Wordpress and Drupal getting more and more powerfull, and with sinken Webspace prices (I got 75 GB now for 10 bucks a month), this might become more easily for more and more people.

2. After all I’ve read, I wouldn’t consider Chrome OS as yet another OS. And Windows and OS X are not the Competitors. I think it should be better compared to Amazons Kindle or Apples Iphone. It’s a pure Browser-Gadget.

3. I’m pretty convinced right now, that Google is ONLY following long-term Goals. They realized the size and the impact of the “Medienwandel” (“Media Shift”?). All they have done lately, Chrome, Wave, Contacts, Profiles; all the improvementes they have made in the last two year are not aiming for “the next big thing” but for a constant, consistent development.

I once used the Metaphor a A380 over Hamburg, approaching for landing … because of it’s size, it seems unrealistically slow. I looks like it has to fall from the sky like a stone. But actually it isn’t. It isn’t at all.

A nice example for a very successful category of virtual goods, which you did not mention, are ring tones, btw. – which amounted for the largest revenues from the sales of digital music for a long time (not anymore, though). Margins are still interesting, here …

Considering that consumer demand – at least in the developed countries – is still moving from the lower to the upper layers of the Maslow pyramid, and this is where brands achieve the highest margins, I see great potential for virtual goods. I don’t know about realistically yearly growth rates in the next 10 years, but I don’t see a hard limit for the growth here in the near future, neither. As you have mentioned yourself $6B is not much – it is not much of consumer’s budgets, either. So, while these consumers are slowly moving a part of their “life” into the digital realm, the will spend more and more of their budgets for digital status symbols.