What Free Costs
Free is everyone’s favorite word. Marketers talk about it. Spam engines search for it. It gets everyone’s attention and I’m as guilty as everyone. All the technologies I cover at 90 Second Tips are free.
The problem is we treat free things differently then we treat things that cost us money. We have all heard the quote, “you get what you pay for”. This has always been fairly accurate when figuring out the quality of something until the Internet took over.
Facebook is probably the best and easiest way to communicate with family and friends ever created and it’s free. Much like the over 100 free technologies I cover at www.90secondtips.com.
When thinking about you get what you pay for that holds no weight when looking at internet technologies. Gmail is free and in my opinion the best email and communication system available anywhere including all the paid versions.
The problem comes in because we don’t respect or treat these free technologies like we would if we had to pay for them. If Gmail cost $1,000.00 a month it would be well worth it and we would treat it very differently.
Many people use Gmail to send and receive email and that’s it. There are at least 100 other technologies that come with a Gmail account that many people never see.
Google Voice
Google Docs
Google Calendar
Google Alerts
Google Desktop
It goes on and on and each of these technologies is a fantastic business solution by itself. As I said earlier if we had to pay for Gmail we would spend the time to look at everything that was included to get the most out of our investment.
When it’s free we just use it for a limited purpose and never spend the time to really find the value in these systems.
This site was created to discuss free technologies and show you all the things you may have missed due to the fact that they are free and don’t cause us to say to ourselves, “What else do I get for my money?”.
