Free

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

免费（一）

译者：《长尾》作者 Chris Anderson 的新书。这篇其实不是原文，而是《连线》杂志上的一篇6000字的预览。我只翻一段，发出来起个推广作用。期待《Free》的 free 发行……

译者又：翻一段太寒伧了，所以翻了第一页。

“吉列之父” 在40岁的时候还是一个灰心丧气的发明者，一个愤世嫉俗的反资本主义者，一个软木瓶塞推销员。彼时为1895年。尽管父母很富有，他也精力充沛，脑子活跃，但工作上就是一事无成。他把这归罪于市场竞争这个魔鬼。头年，他还出了本书，书名为《人类的漂流》。在书中，他声称，所有的行业都应该被一家全民所有的公司所取代；几百万的美国人都应该生活在一座名为“大都会”的巨大城市里，靠尼亚加拉瀑布来供电。他的公司老板对他只有一个建议：拜托，发明点哪怕用了就扔的东西好不好。

一天，他在用旧式剃刀刮胡子的时候发现剃刀磨损得很厉害，无法再磨快了。这时，一个念头冒了出来。为什么不用薄的金属片来做刀刃呢？这样，男人们就可以直接丢弃钝了的刀片，而不需要费时间去打磨刀刃。经过了几年的试验，使用抛弃型刀片的安全剃刀问世了。不过，一开始的销路并不好。在第一年，也就是1903年，吉列总共卖出了51把刀柄和168块刀片。在接下来的二十年里，他试过了种种所能想到的营销手段。他把他的头像印在包装上，把自己塑造成一个传奇人物。他把数以百万计的剃刀以极低的折扣价卖给军队，希望士兵们能把战时养成的习惯保留到和平时期。他还把剃刀以散装的方式卖给银行，以便送给来存款的储户。吉列剃刀几乎跟所有的东西都捆绑销售过——口香糖，袋装咖啡，茶，调料，甚至零食小点。大量的产品通过这种”免费午餐“的形式销售出去，但吉列的获益远不止如此。通过派送不含刀片的剃刀，吉列创造了对抛弃型刀片的需求。在过了若干年之后，这种商业模式在各行各业中已经成为了一种基础模式：手机是免费的，月计划是收费的；视频游戏杆是便宜的，游戏是贵的；在办公室里安装新潮的咖啡机是不要钱的，但经理们来买咖啡可就要掏腰包了。

通过送东西来赚钱——这种天方夜谭的想法在吉列手中变成了现实。但是，直到不久前，所谓的“免费”还只不过是一种经济学家们称之为“交叉补贴”的模式——即把一种产品的成本转嫁到另一种产品上：不管买一送一也好，还是买服务送产品也好，都是如此。

但是，在过去十年里，出现了另外一种免费。这种新模式不是基于“交叉补贴”，而是基于这样一个事实：产品本身的成本在急遽下降。打个比方说，假如钢铁的价格降到了几乎为零，那吉列就可以把剃刀和刀片都免费赠送了，靠另外的产品来挣钱（譬如剃须液）。

互联网就是一片免费的乐土。在经过了十五年的种种实践后，关于在互联网上是免费还是付费的争论，已趋于尾声。在2007年，《纽约时报》免费开放了；《华尔街日报》的大部分内容也将免费开放，不过，剩下的付费部分，按新东家默多克的说法，将会“非常非常地特别……不过也很遗憾地告诉你，可能会更昂贵。” 这让人回想起了斯图尔特｀布兰德在1984年所做的断言：“信息呼唤着免费，信息也呼唤着昂贵…… 这种角力将会一直持续下去。“

作为一种新的营销模式，免费经济羽翼渐丰。Radiohead乐队，Nine Inch Nails 乐队的 Trent Reznor，以及 MySpace 上的一大堆乐队，都通过提供免费音乐的方式，成功地获得了听众的青睐。在游戏产业，靠广告支撑的在线小游戏以及免费试玩的网游是增长最快的板块。Google 所提供的一切服务——从 Gmail 到 Picasa，到电话搜索——都是免费的。

是支持互联网的后台技术促成了“免费经济学“的兴起。正如摩尔定律所指出的，单位计算能力每十八个月就会降价一半，带宽和存储的价格降得更快。所有的趋势都表明：在线业务的成本将会趋近于零。