We are about to try something a bit different on this blog. I have reviewed the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson for Thursday’s FT and you can read the start of the review below. But, instead of leaving it at that, we are using the review as the stepping-off point for a debate.

Chris has agreed to respond to my review, and his first salvo will be published tomorrow morning here, at the same time as readers of the paper in Europe get a chance to read my review. I don’t know of any other cases (although there may be some) where an author has responded to a review simultaneously.

I plan to continue the debate with my thoughts on Chris’s response tomorrow and hopefully we will carry on with the exchange until the weekend, or we get tired of it, whichever comes sooner.

To start things off, here are the first few paragraphs of my review:

Chris Anderson has built a career out of making bold pronouncements that the economics of Silicon Valley – the way in which software and digital technology are built and distributed – are likely to spread to, and ultimately conquer, the rest of the economy.

His first claim, in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less, was that consumption patterns were being fundamentally altered by the plentiful and cheap shelf space provided by digital technology. Instead of most dollars being spent on hits, consumption would instead skew towards thousands of niche products.

Now Mr Anderson, editor-in-chief of the US edition of Wired magazine, has followed that up with Free: The Future of a Radical Price, a manifesto for giving away products to consumers rather than charging for them. He writes: “There really is a free lunch. Sometimes you get more than you pay for.”

The obvious criticism of Mr Anderson’s work is that, as Mandy Rice-Davies said of Lord Astor’s denial of an affair with her: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

Wired is a West Coast magazine, grounded in Silicon Valley’s software culture, where companies such as Apple profit from the free availability of “content” that runs on their far-from-free hardware.

Silicon Valley, and particularly Google, has a brutal variation of King Gillette’s razors-and-blades business model. According to this theory, the razor is sold cheaply in order to get consumers hooked and then be inclined to buy pricey disposable blades. And in the case of the biggest company of the internet age, it gets newspapers, music, television and film companies to take the losses while it accumulates the gains.

You can read the rest of the review here. Please follow the debate between Chris and I, and offer your own thoughts in the comments below.

July 2, 2009 2:46am in Media, Technology | Comment