Give Something to Get Something

I already mentioned this on my other blog, but Verisign is now giving away free secure storage. It's another great example of giving something away to generate demand for the core product. In this case, Verisign is giving away OpenID and secure storage services in hopes of (I assume) driving sales of their strong authentication tokens.

We've seen a good amount of this in the software business too - companies give away a free less-feature-rich version – or sometimes a small utility – with hopes that you'll want to upgrade to the full version. When I was at MaXware (now SAP), we had a free LDAP browser utility. I think it got us some name recognition amongst the right audience, but I don't know if it led to any real sales. Of course, the utility was years old and all but decommissioned by the time I joined the company.

I'd love to find some data on this approach to see what works and what doesn't.