In that sense, figuring out how to monetize good but free services is a non-issue because you won't be building a good but free service.
There's also a good reason to believe that lots of people WOULD pay for something like Gmail.
Remember people trying to sell off invites back in the early days?
More importantly, having a direct line to the company controlling their email -- attached by money -- is a very appealing prospect for people who understand that free is dicey.
In the mean time, I'm making a lot of money selling things where there are tons of free alternatives. People don't pay for content? I made $40,000 writing & selling an ebook about rich web app performance.
I'm hardly the only one.
Lots of people would rather blame the market, blame the customer, or blame the economy than consider that maybe they didn't do due diligence.
I'll be writing a lot more about that in the future.
I guess the thinking is that your so impressed with gmail for personal use that when you do start up a company you will use them for your business.
But I think a lot of the community sites can't charge money. I don't see Twitter, Reddit, StackOverflow and other such community sites gaining nearly enough users that way.
Granted the network effect is still in effect, but it could be a killer freemium.
It's a bad idea to look at a behemoth like Google, who operates on completely different physics, and decide to model yourself after them without knowing the full story.
Anyways, I have a couple of ideas kicking around in my skull. Right now I'm trying to get some work so I can fund them with my salary though. One idea relies on ads for money, because no one in their right mind would pay for such a simple service. The other two are direct sales things.
Also, after reading the article, I became curious about which "fucking awesome" products the author (you?) is selling. I didn't see any links on the page to them.
The reply button only shows up after some amount of time, which increases with nesting level.
My main products now are:
http://letsfreckle.com/ http://jsrocks.com http://yearofhustle.com/
EDIT: I also do in-person (and soon, online) JavaScript training (http://jsmasterclass.com)... and I have quite a lot of free not-for-money sites you might recognize, including http://twistori.com and http://everytimezone.com
EDIT: I am a linkwhore.
The fancy word for that is "meretrix" (or the Latin "meretrice" for maximum pomposity). A word like that suits your style, even if the definition doesn't :-)
They are also clearly trying to cover ALL the bases, to have everybody sucking at their proverbial info-teat. They want you to store your calendar, docs, contacts, phone, videos, status updates, internet reading, spreadsheets, etc., etc., all on their servers.
Did you know they used Goog-411 to collect spoken phonemes to improve their auto-captioning of YouTube videos (so they can search them)?
This is clever… and largely unknown… and slightly scary, since it shows on the kind of game they're playing.
OK so this is totally off-topic. My point is, if you don't have the capital of Google, or their 30-level thinking, charge money! You can make a really good income. :)
Source?
Nutella is delicious! It's a chocolate hazel-nut spread. :)
Btw, I have never clicked on a google ad. Not once. I also now have adblock installed. Monetizing useful but free services is a tough problem, not to be dismissed.