Class Observation – Whole new world

What I learned Monday in class is this:

In order to combat all the free flowing, easily available, “free” information, you have to make your product or book or website SO incredible that people feel that it’s worth paying the money to get the information from you. That’s a tough battle to win. “Free” is always more appealing to the general public, even if the product may have more worth at a cost.

As a future designer of some sort, I will definitely want to market and sell my designs/products. Knowing this, I have to keep in mind that I have to go even farther and create something so amazing that people are willing to pay for it, even if they can find something similar for free.

I feel like the overall message of this week is that we’ve entered into a whole new world of “Free”. Whereas “free” used to have a catch, now “free” information can be really free because of the internet. The best example is Blogging, free publication.

So now the problem is not for the user to access the free information, but the producer to get the consumer to pay anything ever for a product when they can likely get it elsewhere for free. With google, almost anything can be found for free. So why pay?

Another topic we talked about in class today was “Waste”. This is a product of having something without a cost. When you pay for something you are less likely to waste it. In this sense, free can be harmful.

It’s something to think about. Is free worth it? Free is heavily positive for the consumer but can be equally harmful for the producer.
It’s a whole new world of free.

Tags: free