No it's not. The other way is to make the best damn product in the market. I hate to give cliched examples, but since we are talking market dominance, see Windows, Adsense and iPod.
At one point in all these product's lives they were lousier and smaller as compared to their competitors. But they won out because the low barrier to adoption (read: free) drove usage, and from usage, more improvements.
In the context of the OP's blog post, we are talking about winning in terms of building a profitable business, for which I believe building a good product and selling it is a better strategy than getting popular by giving away a crap product for free.
The gist of the matter is that you should be clear what you are selling:
* a product
* advertising space/lead generation (if you are free)
* yourself (acquisition)
I see most web startups are going for the second and third options, but it seems it is mostly out of fear and the status quo, not careful consideration of the pros and cons.
When they first started out, both were lousier, scrappy, free products.
> In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily.
There is nothing unfair about this comparison. Releasing free products and making money on other things has always been a viable way to compete against bigger, more established players. See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
Hope this helps.
I'm not sure what your examples where suppose to illustrate. Both Windows and Adsence rule because of the (practical) monopoly positions of their creators. iPod's only one that may have dominated for being the better product but If google started giving away crappy media players they would quickly out dominate iPods.
On the other hand if you have an application that actually makes money for someone or saves money (in other words translates to direct dollar amount) you might be better off charging as long as your user base perceives the value they get out of your application as more than what they pay for it.
I really think that me-too-free app mentality has to change. Startup founders (especially micro ISVs) need to understand the fact that coming up with a business model is the core of the business not an afterthought.
It took the court system to slow them down.
That was not for their dominant desktop OS, it was for using their monopoly to push IE and server products.
You can call out Microsoft on dodgy anti-competitive behaviour in some respects, but you cannot take away credit for building the solid product that is Windows. Heck, even now after goofing up with Vista, they are back with Windows 7.
Yet I have still found it as much as impossible to buy a computer without windows preinstalled.
So do I, but that Linux didn't exist when Windows became dominant; it came much later.
I use Xubuntu, and it's the best damn work station I've ever used, but sometimes I wish gtk apps were a bit more beautiful.
Just as MS used the omnipresent Windows platform to push Office, IE, and countless other products (with varying success) they used DOS to push Windows. That is why Windows won.
There's nothing dodgy about it - the point is there is more than one way to win the market, and being the best product is pretty far down on the list.
The collaboration between IBM and Microsoft unraveled in 1990, between the releases of Windows 3.0 and OS/2 1.3. Initially, at least publicly, Microsoft continued to insist the future belonged to OS/2. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft even took to calling OS/2 "Windows Plus".[9] However, during this time, Windows 3.0 became a tremendous success, selling millions of copies in its first year.[10] Much of its success was because Windows 3.0 (along with MS-DOS) was bundled with most new computers.[11] OS/2, on the other hand, was only available as an expensive stand-alone software package. In addition, OS/2 lacked device drivers for many common devices such as printers, particularly non-IBM hardware.[12] Windows, on the other hand, supported a much larger variety of hardware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
The other question to consider is why another PC OS didn't come up to compete with DOS/Windows considering that Microsoft actually helped open up the hardware ecosystem. A dominant player with most of the "market share" need not stop a new better player (see web search). Maybe it's worth acknowledging that making a good OS is a hard problem which MS cracked better than the rest.
Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't
the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were
pretty significantly better.
The hardware requirements OS/2 were higher, Windows had better drivers support and provided better tools for developers. And the real battle was in '94 when IBM released OS/2 Warp. In '95 it was already game over.
People weren't using OS/2 for the same reasons they wouldn't go for Win NT 4. It was technically superior, but incompatible with what people wanted.
Win 95 had the same quality as Mac OS ... both were pieces of shit that got the job done, the difference being that you could get Win 95 for a better price and that it was future-proof (Win NT was already on sale for businesses).
IMHO, with Windows Microsoft only had 2 fuckups ... Windows ME and Vista. For all the other versions Microsoft just provided what consumers wanted.
I used OS 7.x for a good while, and it was generally speaking not better than its contemporary, windows 95.
In fact it might have been even worse, at least as far as multitasking and stability go.
Windows 98 SE was actually a fairly good system as long as you didn't overtax its somewhat limited multi-tasking ability & ran it on high quality hardware (far less crash prone than Mac OS 8.x)
Actually previous poster made a good point with Vista problems - after a few years of bad press and Apple being a favorite, MS made a killing with Windows 7. Not for free.
Even Windows 95 wasn't great (especially for programmers) -- it was Windows NT 4.0 that was good enough to use to get work done. It was a combination of being less crashy and having more native software available.
That's a strange way to look at it. Publishers are selling space to Google for a cut of the Adsense revenue. Google is selling contextual ads within those spaces to advertisers.
What's free in that?