Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson speaks about the past, present and future of free on the Granville Island Stage during his keynote Vidfest 2008 address.
“Waste is good” reads the Powerpoint slide 20-feet high, but before you reach for the outrage button, Anderson describes waste as an necessary imperative for innovation, whether biological or technological. It is the idea that waste creates abundance which ultimately reduces user costs and makes advancements in technology available to the end user in opposition to the glass box model of the 70’s when technology was still the sole purview of IT departments.
It is Moore’s Law in action which states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, which has the practical application of halving the cost at the same rate. Anderson uses the downward spiraling costs of storage and bandwidth as evidence of this hypothesis using Yahoo’s move to unlimited email storage as example.
Free is a hard concept to get your head around as an independent producer, a photographer for example, but, he insists, business models have to change and they are. Perhaps the slices are getting smaller but maybe the pie is getting larger? Exerts of Anderson’s book The Long Tail are available here: http://www.changethis.com/10.LongTail and his blog can be found at: http://www.thelongtail.com/
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Wired Magazine Editor, fields media questions following his Keynote address at Vidfest 2008 in Vancouver, BC, May 23, 2008
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