This is the final part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the Coda. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

"Coda" is the very last section of the Long Tail, and this is the very last section of my critique of the book.

The book’s "Coda" is a two page piece that talks about 3D printers, which may enable all kinds of other goods to become digital – just as documents and music and photos and videos have all moved from being solid things to being digital – "materialized" where you download them.

And the lesson of 3D printing is that we’ll see "the explosion of variety we’ve seen in our culture thanks to digital efficiencies" [226] extended to other areas of our lives.

The coda summarizes some of the things I find so frustrating about this book, and why I’ve spent so much time on it. It’s not just that it’s a bad book – although I do believe it is – but that it is a bad book about some really important changes; changes with the … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 14 – Long Tail Rules. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

I’m getting tired, and need to get to the end of this book quickly. Then I can write a wrap-up post and be done. This final chapter (almost! there is a "coda") contains nine rules for building "a Consumer Paradise" [217], grouped under three headings. Here we go.

Lower Your Costs [217-219]
Rule 1: Move inventory to the edge – The advice is to transfer your costs to your suppliers: keep a virtual inventory. For example, Amazon Marketplace products are "held at the very edge of the network by thousands of small merchants. Cost to Amazon: zero" [218].
Rule 2: Let customers do the work – He calls this "crowdsourcing" [219]. Let customer reviews rank your books, write your content, and so on, because "collectively, customers have virtually unlimited time and energy" [219].

As I’ve said repeatedly, the benefits of being an aggregator are that you profit from being a natural monopoly, or at least part of … Continue reading

In the middle of another fine piece from Nicholas Carr, here is Radical Transparency at work.

Asked how it uses water and electricity at its sites, Google executive Rhett Weiss said, "We’re in a highly competitive industry and, frankly, one or two little pieces of information like that in the hands of our competitors can do us considerable damage. So we can’t discuss it."

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The real Web 2.0.

Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 13 – Beyond Entertainment. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

This penultimate chapter of the book describes "five examples of the Long Tail at work outside of media and entertainment" [201]. These examples are eBay, KitchenAid, Lego, Salesforce.com, and Google. There is another side to each of these stories.

eBay [201-203] has been hugely successful at being a marketplace for all kinds of odds and ends. Is it a Long Tail success?

The other side of the story. Let’s remember that a Long Tail business is one that provides both the "head" and the "tail" of products. As Anderson writes, MP3.com was a music aggregation site, but it failed. The "problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail" [149]. Meanwhile, iTunes focused more on the head, and makes all its money from it, then apparently builds on the familiarity it provides to use smart software to help people expand their tastes. Its growth came from being a marketplace for junk; Anderson’s story of its growth implicitly admits … Continue reading