Today’s economy is both confusing and tricky. Even for the most prestigious mainstream economists. The fact is info-tech has brought to the table a new type of good that doesn’t fit into the marginal utility or supply and demand theories economists have been sticking to for the last decades. Take a software built from several pieces of open source libraries, frameworks and languages. And have this software also given as open source. The software(good) can be used unlimited times and the cost was zero(built from work of thousands of collaborative developers). What is the good’s price? Marx’s theory of labor doesn’t apply, Marshall’s supply and demand theory? No. Wieser’s marginal utility? Maybe. Smith’s invisible hand? Not!My point is that info-tech is challenging mainstream economic models. Prices of new technologies(indirectly tech ventures) are going down to zero in short periods of time. VCs and private equity funds need to understand this. I see so much confusion and mistakes when this is ignored. I’ve had several debates with people interested in the topic but the sole arguments I’ve gotten against this thesis are examples of info monopolies like Google or Apple or other examples of unfounded I.P. Say these were deregulated or beaten down by open source, and you have no sustainable pricing theory. The last decade companies have dealt with this challenge temporarily by having software companies add value trough customer service, training, branding and using their customer’s private data as assets. But how much would those services around software be worth when the non digital remaining group of the world becomes digital savvy? Or when these value adding services are also automated from open source tools? Hmmm.. a lot of food for thought. Hopefully not too much for the world economists to choke on.