Okay, I’ve got one for you.
Why in hell do people flip out at a rumor that Facebook is going to start charging for its services?
A) Aint’a gonna happen, my little chickadees. Facebook’s business model is based on you donating time to market research playing Farmville, favoriting products for free advertising, and writing book reviews, ‘kay? This is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on a sitcom and the audience is much more specifically targeted. As far as revenue? I assure you they get more money off of advertising than they could out of charging you.
B) Even if that weren’t so, why does a company owe you an expensive service that’s a pain in the butt to maintain?
Do I mostly go for the free services? Yep. I use Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo, Gmail, Google Docs and Wikipedia. Shoot, several of the former I even use professionally! But there are services I pay for. My Livejournal account is a paid account, because I like the lack of advertising. My blogs are hosted on a server I pay for, ditto.
Are there a lot of free services offered on the Internet? Yeah, and a lot of them are pretty cool. I think it’s a neat development that we can do so much for little money. If a service isn’t worth me paying for, I don’t. I have a free Pandora account because I don’t find the ads that annoying, and I never have it playing for more than 40 hours in a month.
But it seems kind of silly to me for people to think that sysadmins and programmers are supposed to work for free or something so people can post about what they had for breakfast, ya know?