【英语生活】真有免费午餐？

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 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.

Furthermore, the book is being published at a time when many US newspapers that followed the urging of internet seers and published everything free on the internet are going bust.

Mr Anderson has already been treated to a sceptical review by Malcom Gladwell, the New Yorker writer.

But it is not fair to dismiss Mr Anderson as a digital utopian who is in intellectual and financial hock to Silicon Valley companies: Free is more than propaganda for the West Coast clan. It is largely an insightful, steady and scrupulous analysis of the past and present of free products and services, and how digital technology encourages fresh experiments.

If it was not conceived so smartly and written with such verve, it would be in danger of being worthy but dull. Mr Anderson knows better than to allow his work to read like an economics textbook, however, and brightens up the text with clever historical examples and eye-catching assertions.

The problem is that he veers between sweeping statements and balancing paragraphs in a manner that leaves the reader unsure of what he is actually saying. It is an intellectual version of a ride in a New York taxi whose driver alternately pumps the accelerator and stamps on the brakes.

Early on, we learn: “The new form of Free is not a gimmick, a trick to shift money from one pocket to another [like razors and blades]. Instead, it's driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero. While the last century's Free was a powerful marketing method, this century's Free is an entirely new economic model.”

That is a big claim and it never really gets substantiated, at least not at the scale of Mr Anderson's rhetoric. Actually, quite a bit of what he claims to be new appears really to be the virtual equivalent of “buy one, get one free” or the cheap subscriptions long offered by US magazines.

The internet does, of course, change things. The biggest shift, which formed the basis ofThe Long Tail, is that it allows anyone to send out a digital product, from a document to a song, to everywhere on earth at such a low cost that it might as well be free.

Mr Anderson believes that this allows the vision of the French economist Joseph Bertrand to be fulfilled. As companies compete vigorously, prices fall to just above the marginal cost of production. Since the marginal cost of making a piece of software is zero, and the cost of digital distribution is zero, prices ought to fall to free.

His vision has two flaws. First, as Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, has pointed out, network effects unleashed by digital technology tend not to spawn free competition among equals but a “winner takes all” effect in which a single company emerges with all the spoils. In the software era, that company was Microsoft; in the internet era, it is Google.

The second flaw is that, even if the cost of digital distribution is lower than that of physical distribution, the marginal cost of production is not cut to zero. Companies have many costs, from marketing to employing people to make things. Offering things free on the internet is loss-leading just as surely as handing Jell-O recipe books to American housewives was in 1904.

The most plausible contender for an “entirely new economic model” made possible by the internet is what Fred Wilson, the New York venture capitalist, has dubbed “freemium”.

This refers to companies that allow anyone to use their products for free but offer a premium version for which a few users are persuaded to pay.

Many internet companies employ freemium, from Skype, which charges customers to make computer-to-phone calls, to companies that charge for more versatile versions of software, and media companies, including the Financial Times, which offers a tiered subscription model on its website.

Many companies, however, are still experimenting to see what, if anything, works.

By far the most effective ways to raise money from customers are either to charge them directly or to charge advertisers to reach them. Nothing else is half as effective in producing revenues and profits.

Mr Anderson does not really dispute this. Revenues from online and traditional advertising comprise at least half of what he dubs the global “free economy”, which he estimates at $300bn .

There is no question that the internet encourages companies to offer their products free but it has also encouraged a lot of them to burn through their capital and collapse. That is a new economic model of sorts but it is hardly salutary.
 

克里斯•安德森(Chris Anderson)通过做出大胆声明造就了自己的职业，他宣布，硅谷经济学——制造和发布软件及数字技术的方式——可能会扩大到并最终占领经济中的其它领域。

安德森首先在《长尾理论：为什么企业的未来是销售更多冷门商品》(The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less)一书中声称，数字技术提供的大量廉价货架，正彻底改变着消费模式。大多数美元并非花在热门商品上，反而投向了数以千计的利基商品。

《连线》(Wired)杂志总编安德森目前在《免费：激进定价的未来》(Free: The Future of a Radical Price)（宣扬向消费者免费赠送产品，而不是向消费者收费）一书中继续阐述了这一观点。他写道：“如今确实存在免费的午餐。有时你得到的要比你付出的多。”

正如马蒂•赖斯-戴维斯(Mandy Rice-Davies)谈到阿斯特勋爵(Lord Astor)否认与她存在绯闻一样，人们对安德森作品的明显批评是：“恩，他会那么说，不是吗？”

《连线》是一本美国西海岸的杂志，植根于硅谷的软件文化。在硅谷，苹果(Apple)等公司的盈利来源于“内容”的免费获取，而这些内容在远非免费的硬件上运行。

硅谷——尤其是谷歌(Google)——对金•吉列(King Gillette)“剃刀与刀片”(razors-and-blades)的业务模式进行了野蛮的变革。根据这种理论，廉价销售剃刀是为了吸引顾客，接着促使他们购买昂贵的一次性刀片。在互联网时代这家规模最大的公司的例子中，谷歌在累积利润的同时，让报纸、音乐、电视和电影公司承担了损失。

此外，在该书出版之际，许多美国报纸即将破产。这些报纸服从互联网预言家的强烈要求，在网上免费出版所有的内容。

《纽约客》(New Yorker)作家马尔科姆•格拉德威尔(Malcom Gladwell)已对安德森进行了一番怀疑性评论。

但是把安德森看作一名在智力和财务上亏欠硅谷公司的数字乌托邦，这是不公平的：对于美国西海岸的群体而言，《免费》一书不仅仅是一种宣传，它在很大程度上针对免费产品和服务的前世今生以及数字技术如何鼓励新的尝试，进行了深刻、可靠且审慎的分析。

要不是安德森构思如此巧妙并投入如此多的热情写作，《免费》一书就会变得虽有价值却很枯燥。不过，安德森明白不会让自己的作品读起来象经济学教科书那样，他利用历史上的睿智例子和吸引眼球的观点为本书增色。

问题在于，他在述说观点和段落协调之间摇摆不定，让读者无法确定他到底在说什么。这是一种在纽约乘坐出租车的学术版本，司机交替地踩油门和刹车。

在书的一开始，我们读到：“新的免费形式不是把钱从一个人的口袋转到另一个人的口袋（就象剃刀和刀片那样）的伎俩。相反，免费是由于受到让商品和服务成本接近零的新的非凡能力的推动。上世纪的免费是有效的市场营销策略，而本世纪的免费则是一种全新的经济模式。”

这个重要说法从未真正得到证实，至少在安德森所言范围内如此。实际上，他所声称的相当多的新的免费模式其实只不过相当于“买一送一”，或者美国杂志长期以来提供的廉价订阅。

当然，互联网确实改变了世界。其中最大的改变是，允许任何人以极低的成本向地球上各个角落发送数字产品，从文件到歌曲，成本之低，几乎与免费差不多。这构成了长尾理论的基础。

安德森认为，这种改变让法国经济学家约瑟夫•伯特兰(Joseph Bertrand)的梦想得以实现。由于公司竞争激烈，价格降至略高于边际生产成本之上的水平。既然制造软件的边际成本为零，销售数字产品的成本也为零，那么价格也就应降至零。

他的观点存在两点缺陷，首先，正如谷歌首席经济学家哈尔•瓦里安(Hal Varian)指出的那样，数字技术释放的网络效应往往不会在竞争对手之间催生大量免费竞争，而是“赢家拿走一切”，这让一家公司独享所有战利品。在软件时代，这个公司叫微软(Microsoft)，在互联网时代，这家公司名叫谷歌。

第二个缺陷是，即使数字产品的销售成本低于物流成本，边际生产成本也不会降至零。公司还面临着诸多成本，从市场营销到聘用员工制造产品等。在互联网上免费赠送产品肯定会首先以低价吸引顾客从而刺激利润更高的销售，就像1904年向美国家庭主妇发放洁乐公司(Jell-O)的烹饪书籍一样。

最有可能取得“全新经济模式”(互联网令其成为可能)称号的是，纽约风险投资家弗雷德•威尔森(Fred Wilson)所谓的“免费+收费模式”(freemium)。

这种模式指的是，企业允许所有人免费使用其产品，但同时提供增值服务，说服少量用户为此付费。

许多网络公司采用了“免费+收费模式”，从向客户收费提供电脑-电话间通话服务的Skype，到提供更多多功能收费软件的公司，以及包括英国《金融时报》在内的传媒公司，英国《金融时报》在其网站上提供分级订阅模式。

然而，许多公司仍在进行尝试，以确定哪种模式（如果有的话）会奏效。

从顾客那里筹资的最有效方式是要么直接向他们收费，要么向广告商收费。其它方式在创造收入和利润方面的效果还不及上述方式的一半。

安德森没有真正就此进行讨论。在线和传统广告收入至少占到他所谓的全球“免费经济”规模的一半，他估计，这笔收入将达到3000亿美元。

毫无疑问，互联网鼓励公司免费提供产品，但同时也促使大量公司消耗其资金并破产。这算得上是某种新的经济模式，但几乎不会带来任何好处。

译者/君悦