FREEMIUM VS PREMIUM
An engineering graduate from Anna University, Rakesh has been closely working with Top global IT vendors on various Unified Communications and core networking projects. He is a Cisco certified Advanced collaboration Architecture sales specialist
One fine evening while I was contemplating on the debate between free and paid services my cousin who was passing by bumped on to me and enquired why I was in deep thoughts. So I told him about what I was thinking and figured out that he was trying to tell me something and obviously he told me like “Bro, Wikipedia is a free service and it is working like a butter”. “Google is a free service and Facebook and so on….” he continued. I was totally frustrated hearing this from him as I am a professional service value Manager and don’t want to give out free services to my customers. I badly need to defend myself. I asked him couple of questions like “Where do Wikipedia store all their work?” obviously it should be in some datacenter and next question “Won’t that DC charge Wikipedia/FB/Google for using their service?” He replied “Bro, yes they will charge them. But I am not paying them to use it right?”
In my previous organization my Sales target per Quarter is $500K and yearly $2Mil. It was 2012, I was using a stellar tool called as “Jigsaw” for contactdatabase generation. I was meeting my targets using this tool and life was great. One day, it was 2014 “Jigsaw” was bought by “Data.com” and all of the sudden they said you need to pay for what you use. I was shocked, helpless. I