I'm starting to pity economists, beyond the whole "how did so many of you morons miss the economy melting down" thing. I'm feeling bad for them because they've got to try and analyze a lot of crazy trends in the actual working parts of the world economy, and things are changing rapidly and are far more distributed.
Last column I speculated on the various facets of Freemium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium) that I feel need to be further explored and understood. I'm quite enthused about the model and feels it holds great promise.
Now assuming Freemium is the wave of the future, as opposed to a tiny splash in the big ocean of pricing models that lies on the shores of weird economic metaphors, there are going to be changes in more than just how we sell and buy. There will be changes in how people analyze economic information, from understanding sales, to evaluating the performance of an industry.