I can’t recall what I was doing 3 months ago, but obviously I overlooked Andrew Chen’s Your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise, which was quoted by the SKMurphy team.

While I can’t agree with Andrew more — I sure do think profitability is the most important rule for any business — I just would like to add that not all businesses can  leverage on the freemium business model effectively due to the non-sticky nature of their offering. For example, soon after its launch, Microsoft Bing is already stealing some of Google and/or Yahoo’s users. Hence even though the advertisers are their true paying clients, it’s still us non-paying users who are acting like air, earth and water, from which grows the crop that feeds the search engines.

But there is no disagreement here — Andrew is speaking for the chicken and I’m talking about the egg, which are just the different forms of the same bird. Or it’s another story of one asked “Should I do it?” Confucius said “No”; another one also asked “Should I do it?” and Confucius said “Yes”.