<offtopic> Tiered Pricing for Free Web Services

["Bullard, Claude L \(Len\)" <len.bullard@intergraph.com>]

How long until the mashups have to pay for free 
services in a tiered model?  I note that Google 
reversed the policy and only asks for notification 
if one is expecting lots of traffic, but at scale, 
they can afford that.  Others can't and investors 
demand profits and growth.

Once upon a time, airlines had lots of goodies. 

The basis of the mashup is the simplicity of the
components.  The basis of airline goodies was 
high ticket costs and non-commodity passengers but 
essentially commodity airliners.  Once again, 
call-girl prices for street level services.  As 
long as the quality is high and the customers 
are selected (not selective, selected, say 
cherry-picked), that economy works.  But as the 
market transitions into a condition where price 
and other competitive pressures require less 
selection of customers, quality declines as 
as supplies are limited.  No one is interested, 
they say, in such markets but that is witless. 
Market evolution is not about CEO choices or 
even buyer choices.  It is about limits on 
resources (say, data quality and currency, 
for example). 

I wonder about the load point for competition 
based on mashups.   To do what the pundits 
tell us is already happening (I doubt it is 
because I think free mashups are sheltering 
in a pool of excess capacity), the Internet 
infrastructure has to have the analog of 
zero-point energy.

len