Commoditize your complements.

Strategy Letter V from Joel Spolsky talks about the principal of making the complements of your product cheaper, in order to increase demand for your product. Good stuff. I love economics. The kind that isn't wrong.


On the why-Netscape-open-sourced topic, which Joel touches on, and the related recent ponderings about whether AOL will or will not start bundling Gecko instead of IE and rekindle the browser wars, Andreesen points out in this recent Infoworld interview: "Internally at AOL, they don't think about browser market share. They think about getting AOL out to millions of people, so they'll do whatever is most expeditious in doing that."