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This is an interesting comparison of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 solutions to the same problem. Everyone knows what Craigslist is - the go-to online classifieds for buying and selling products locally and finding apartments or jobs. An Autotrader is the traditional magazine of choice for selling cars, and also has an online version that is pervasive through the auto ecosystem of websites; Edmunds, KellyBlueBook, MSN Autos: they all link to Autotrader online classified.
I needed to sell one of our cars. I posted the ad on Autotrader on Monday. I use MSN Autos, it links to Autotrader, it was the natural place for me to go. On Tuesday, my spouse suggested that I post the ad on Craigslist. I posted my ad at 11pm on Tuesday night. By 10am on Wednesday morning, I had three prospective buyers lined up to look at the car that day, and two more buyers for the next day. All of those buyers found me through Craiglist. By 1pm on Wednesday, the car was sold.
Craiglist was free, and resulted in a sale within 14 hours. Autotrader cost about $35, and 48 hours after I submitted and paid for my ad, it still hasn't even been posted on their website.
Now Web 2.0 and free aren't exactly synomynous, but there is a great deal of overlap. One thing that free requires is efficiency and effectiveness. I don't know what held up my ad on Autotrader. But you can bet that Craiglist has created the utmost in easy-to-use, intervention-free online advertising. No people are required, there are no manual steps. There can't be, because it's free, so there is no money to pay for inefficient processes.
(In case you are wondering how Craigslist is funded, they do charge for job postings in its top eight markets. But all the rest of the classified ads, in all the many dozens of markets it serves, and all the community discussion boards are free. This Forbes article goes into more detail about their business.)
I think that this is part of the reason why so many Web 2.0 businesses offer simple, easy to use technology, and why so many traditional businesses offer complex, hard to use technology. The Web 2.0 business have to make it simple and error-free so that they can achieve their mostly free business models. They can't afford for it to break, for it to generate support calls, for it to be anything less than fully and perfectly automated. The traditional businesses, by comparison, budget for support costs and extra IT headcount. They expect their products and services to breakl they expect customers to call; they design their products and services expecting to be able to fall back on that safety next.
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has been posting on his blog about his upcoming book Free, which is all about free business models.
The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world's other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.
The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.