Why Buy the Cow?

I know you've heard the old adage, "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free"? So goes in our world of training. Why buy technology when we can get it for free? Let me clue you in on something folks, because I know how brilliant you are! Nothing in life is free. You get what you pay for. Absolutely nothing. No support, no development, no best-practices, no direction, no road-map, no updates; in short, there is a reason it's free. Look at some of the "tools" out there. Open source this, open source that. What this means is, if new versions of the tool are offered, you are stuck. With open source, multiple hands touch the tool so migrations or replication of your data is difficult, or impossible at best. Just as we learned when we entered the world of business, there is no such thing as a free lunch, just as there is no such thing as free technology. Everything has a cost. What are you willing to pay?