Value : Notes on Foss 2009-05-25

India’s Nano is selling the top-end model, not the lower end. I’m not surprised. We see this pattern in other consumer goods, outside of India, too. The iPhone wins not just because it works well, but because it’s the (supposedly more costly) Apple brand. Quality, status, these two are rolled into the package represented by the brand. One is not judging the value of the object (and implicitly the value of one’s judgement) on price alone; that would be vulgar and counterproductive. Rather, one is implicitly making the claim that one can afford value, with the tacit hint that the cheaper things lack actual value.

In thin clients I’ve seen this; and in Foss, the same narrative. Because thin clients (a better term is needed!) are seen as the cheaper version of a packet laptop (or even leaner netbook, and in comparison to the iPhone--please, let’s not utter them in the same sentence), and because Foss is seen as the poor man’s costly proprietary software, neither can win: both lose by virtue of their perceived--not actual--value. It doesn’t matter that, say, OpenOffice.org is superior to proprietary equivalents in many areas, or that, I have no doubt, the Nano is more than adequate for the needs of the typical driver in India and elsewhere. The perceived value of these and their kind is that they are, in a word, “cheap.”

(Digression 1: English has that wonderful word; French does not--it’s bon marché, as if you got a good bargain--and in Spanish, it’s barato, again, hinting at a good bargain. English reduces the logic to “cheap,” a term that implies value as good as the price and hints that you could have done so much better, had you only not been such a miser and so cheap. We are, in English, so often what we buy. I’d be interested to learn what other languages say about their culture of the marketplace, and if they have single, pithy words like, “cheap.”)

(Digression 2: I’m hardly discounting the appeal of the inexpensive and even cheap, which when spun right works. EBay has made billions by emphasizing value you can afford; and I live a long block away by the unbelievably gaudy Honest Ed’s, which loudly proclaims itself as selling cheap things--but that is to say, good deals. Cheap, when spun right, sells. No one wants to be taken for a fool, no matter how much you can afford it.)

So, what we’ve done with OpenOffice.org is to focus on other elements: it’s quality, which is to say, it’s real value, using, whenever possible, actual examples. I started doing this a couple of years ago, at a large conference, when I emphasized that the reason I use OOo is not because it’s free--cheap--but because it gives freedom; not because it does only what I need, but because I can add to it, modify it, make it mine in a way i cannot with proprietary software. I use Firefox, I explained, not because it is cheap and I didn’t have to pay anything for it. All browsers (with a couple of interesting exceptions) are like that: free. Rather, I use it because it does things Safari cannot; and because it gives me freedoms closed source software, however open the APIs may be, does not. I use it, in short, because it is a better commodity and it is a commodity that transcends its status as merely a thing lying there with the trace of its making inaccessible.

Like all Foss, Firefox and OpenOffice.org proclaim their community and that community is accessible.