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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True® - the First For-Profit E-mail Publication (and Still Going Strong). |
Be Unreasonable
Today I got a copy of the new book Be Unreasonable: the Unconventional Way to Extraordinary Business Results by Paul Lemberg. In the book, Lemberg uses me and True as an example of starting a business in an "unreasonable" way (in his chapter on "Unreasonable Thinking").
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He summarizes the birth of This is True and how my colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab were "disbelieving" and "discouraging" of my idea to quit JPL and work online full time with my news commentary -- because they couldn't see how it could possibly work when my plan was to give it away for free.
"Talk about unreasonable," Lemberg writes. "At the time, the Internet was considered to be a pristine, unexploited commons. There were all sorts of cultural rules and norms in place forbidding commerce: nobody was going to sell anything, and certainly no one would be making any money. But Cassingham, seeing the future, charged ahead and ignored those rules. (If you think this is common now, it is. But not in 1994!)"
Elsewhere on this site: the story of how This is True started.
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DOS was not free. Computer manufacturers paid a licensing fee to include it with their computers. The cost, obviously, was passed onto the consumer in the price of the computer.
To upgrade (as I did when DOS 2.0 came out), there was a cost which I had to weigh for cost/benefit ratio. As cost of computers continued to drop, eventually permitting easier consumer purchase, DOS was still (of necessity) included in the package. Licensing fees were still being passed onto the consumer in the hardware price.
Part of the illusion that pre-windows DOS was free was that there was a proliferation of bootleg copies of DOS out there.
Bottom line is that Gates has always charged for DOS. That was the basis of his agreement for the production of IBM clones at the beginning. The anti-trust lawsuits arose from his insistence that computer manufacturers MUST include Internet Explorer in the Microsoft bundle AND must pay for it, passing the cost onto the consumer. That goes into a different direction, though, and could consume pages of discussion. There may be slight discrepancies in my synopsis, but the essence is there.
Posted by: Mike from Dallas | June 16, 2007 1:55 PM
Neither example is quite like True. My comments are based on the statements above, which I did not try to verify. Microsoft gave away enough of their product to force other to have to buy it. Schick introduced a new product at a reduced price, "nearly giving away" was how it was described.
Randy did neither of these with True. He gave away his product, and continues to do so to this day. There was never a requirement to buy a Premium upgrade. The best comparison to prior art I can think of would be some software. Some people sold a piece of software that had some functionality turned off, charging you if you wanted the full version. True did the same thing with copyrighted material, using the newly mainstream email medium for distribution.
Changing the topic, I found most interesting the comment "This is True may have been the first viral marketing success." Randy took the concept of a computer virus, and found a new method of delivery. Now we have been spreading his "virus" for him, and if the people I have "infected" are any example, we are happy to be victims.
Posted by: Hyman from Elizabeth, NJ, USA | June 16, 2007 10:36 PM
Well, I suppose if you wanted to draw comparisons, you could say that it's like a drug dealer getting a customer hooked by first giving away some free hits, and then charging for the addiction. Just a tongue in cheek comparison showing that you could draw an analogy between almost any two things. Like most analogies, what applies to one doesn't necessarily apply to the other. But the concept definitely didn't originate with Bill Gates.
Posted by: Mike from Dallas | June 18, 2007 9:24 AM