Guy reviews Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail which summarises knowledge to date for the lay person. John Hagel argues that we’re in a transition stage that will cause the current long tail industries to consolidate around the three models (infrastructure, innovation, relationship). How long before people are regularly saying that Anderson invented the term, rather than popularising it – for the record Clay Shirky was writing about it in 2003.
[Update: Jupiter reports on negative coverage of the book. It seems to me that arguing about whether the long tail is or isn’t growing misses some of the point. My take is that providing customers access to the long tail that is important – they will purchase from it. You can have a business with “hits only”, but that will have to be a specific customer service choice.