Listening to Jonathan Schwartz on an IT Conversations podcast, he said Web 2.0 is about distributing technology before monetizing it, where Web 1.0 was about monetizing before distribution.

The example, Sun originally charged for downloads of Solaris, now they allow downloading before receiving any money. This resulted in 3 million licenses compared to the prior model.

This new business model is actually quite old, it’s called shareware.

Share the technology, be it an application, web site or content, then count on enough people seeing value in it to pay.

All things old are new again it would seem.