Sprint Goes Unlimited
February 28th, 2008 | by Brad King |I can’t tell you how often I’ve waged this argument with bosses, and each time, I’ve walked away angrier than I thought I could be. The premise: how much of our content to we “give away for free.”
The answer is none of it. You have a sound advertising and business model, you aren’t giving anything away. And if you think you are, then you likely have no idea what your business model is.
In other words, it’s the wrong question. The right question is: what do we charge our customers for the things that we do that aren’t related to our core business?
Of course, that answer isn’t so easy to find, although it’s not impossible. It just means clarifying exactly what you do, and then going whole-hog with that idea. For Sprint, long-time hanger-on in the mobile telecommunications business, that means offering customers a one-size fits all, eat-til-you-drop price for data communications.
That’s $99 for everything, which just undercut the heck out of other telecos (who would probably argue that Sprint is giving its services away for free). Is it a smart move? I don’t know. I’ve used Sprint for years for this very reason. They offer the sanest pricing plans ever. It’s all zeros and ones going through their network. That’s what they do. So why charge more for this one than that zero?
It doesn’t make sense to me. So I stayed with them.
Sure information wants to be free, but that doesn’t mean the cost is nothing. It means I want the freedom to do with my information whatever I want, without it being price prohibitive. I paid for your phone. I paid for use on your network. Now…
Go. Away.
