Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
So I've been using my Kindle for about a month or so. What have I found?
Well first, sorry, no major revelations about it or the Kobo or whatever. I'm enjoying it and it works and it's pretty slick. No real massive changes here.
Now that being said, I have had a few revelations about eBook readers and other devices that take media that we once used physically and can now be had in bits and streams. I'd say a few of these surprised me or were unexpected.
I'm starting to pity economists, beyond the whole "how did so many of you morons miss the economy melting down" thing. I'm feeling bad for them because they've got to try and analyze a lot of crazy trends in the actual working parts of the world economy, and things are changing rapidly and are far more distributed.
Last column I speculated on the various facets of Freemium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium) that I feel need to be further explored and understood. I'm quite enthused about the model and feels it holds great promise.
Now assuming Freemium is the wave of the future, as opposed to a tiny splash in the big ocean of pricing models that lies on the shores of weird economic metaphors, there are going to be changes in more than just how we sell and buy. There will be changes in how people analyze economic information, from understanding sales, to evaluating the performance of an industry.
Freemium is a term I see thrown around a lot this day. It's sunk into the vocabulary of media producers, programmers, and marketers quickly – so quickly I don't think we've really analyzed the repercussions of it. As I've seen the term used more and more, as I've played Freemium games, I think we've gotten so used to it we don't think about it.
This of course gets me thinking. Not that it's not hard to do that . . .