Information Wants to be Expensive…

It is well known that 25 years ago, in a debate with Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers Conference, Stewart Brand first uttered the iconic phrase, “Information wants to be free”. What is less well known, is that this quote is taken out of context, and the full quote sheds a different light on the subject. As detailed in an article by Richard Siklos in the current Fortune Magazine, the conversation went something like this:

First, Wozniak said that “it was a shame companies wouldn’t give engineers the rights to products they developed if the company decided not to market them. ”

Brand answered, “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand,” he said, “information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Wozniak replied, “Information should be free, but your time should not.”

So there we have it – information that is readily available should be free, but information that requires time and effort to find, create or assemble should be expensive – at least expensive enough to pay a fair wage for a person or a company’s time and expenses to provide the information.

In a recent interview, Brand concludes that “because the technology keeps moving, it keeps the tension alive between free and expensive, so it never stabilizes. In a sense, this rewards the innovative and punishes those who can’t innovate of change rapidly.”

This reminded me of  a diagram from Geoffrey Moore’s 2005 book, Dealing with Darwin.

Essentially, information that is complex and scarce is more valuable than information that is simple and readily available. In the digital age, if you stand still, your product will eventually be commoditized and offered at a low price. The only way to keep charging for information is to continually innovate and create. (GW)

P.S. You’ll need to buy the magazine (July 20, 2009) to get the article.

No Free Lunch | Fortune | Richard Siklos  | 20 July 2009

Tagged as: Business, Information