The best things in life are FREE

In case you haven't heard of Chris Anderson (actually there are two of them. One is the curator for the TED events and the other, the one this post is about), is the seminal thinker on two thought provoking and controversial ideas.  The Long Tail and Free. 

The Long Tail is a concept put forth by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article   which described the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More .

With Free Chris states that the most effective price is no price at all. He explores new business model ideas such as cross-premiums (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users) that are beginning to dictate the new approach to business and generating revenue in today's changing market.

If you want to begin strategically thinking about how to succeed in today's market think very closely about these ideas from Chris about Free:

• Digital economics has created a deflationary economy in which there is near zero marginal costs for distribution. Hence, content is getting cheaper and approaching free.

• Today’s generation expects things for free because people have internalized these digital economics. Adults, by contrast, grew up believing that “free” is a gimmick—i.e. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” (Watch this panel of young people to see the accuracy of this observation.)

• Quality is more and more defined by relevance and not price. Thus, you can’t use price to win market share when everything is free. You have to use product differentiation and relevance.

• The challenge for companies is to create premium goods and services that they can sell to “free” customers. Companies need to offer people ways to save time, increase their status, or heighten their reputation and convert these ways to cash.

These are by no means the only ideas that you should be aware of, or take into consideration when navigating today's market, but they're not a bad place to start.