"Hardware wants to be software and software wants to be free"

Speaking of the the Economics of Abundance...Nick Carr coins another great phrase in a post about IBM giving away a software competitor to the Google Appliance.

Comments

[Ken Chan]

Seriously, could they have spent some marketing $ to come up with a better name than IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition?

[yc]

how they made money from the free search?

[yong54321]

Another free webservice at http://www.doitech.com/fitness/ making software free for all consumers. To mass create, view and market!

[Cindy]

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition?! What the..
What's next..

[GrahamHill]

Chris

Sounds like a nascent attempt by IBM to spoil Google's search dominance and to create a 'two-sided market' of its own.

It will be interesting to see if Google's and Yahoo's different audience demographics make this work as well as IBM intends.

Graham Hill

[Joanna Pena-Bickley]

I think what concerns me about all of this free software is that once it is free your brand gains much recognition. the moment you want to charge for something that once was free, you damage your brand by closing off the faucet on a drunk consumer. I would be more impressed to see how IBM was going to monetize this partnership. As we found in Web 1.0 - there is only so much advertising you can sell.

[cheap computers]

We are enthusiastic about this strategic relationship with IBM, building on its rich history of speech research to accelerate the creation and adoption of next-generation speech solutions,” said Paul Ricci, chairman and CEO, Nuance. “Through this relationship, we expect to inspire a new level of technical advancement unprecedented in the speech industry from which the customers and partners of both companies will benefit.