The Long Tail of Software Development

I had a quick conversation with Joe Kraus. He's right now the CEO of JotSpot and in a former life he founded excite.com. Of course, didn't have the heart to tell him that in the late 90's I was shorting the stock like mad (of course got burned in the process, my actions where a year too early!). Anyway, he introduced me to a couple of ideas that I've never heard before.

The one idea I'm now completely embarassed to admit I didn't know was the concept of "The Long Tail". The idea was published in the October issue of Wired Magazine. That's at least a whole month ago, and despite being a Wired subscriber, I hadn't read it myself!

The article examines how physical distribution constrains the availability of product selections thus disenfranchising a majority of potential consumers. There happens to be great opportunities on the other end of the power law curve. Joe Kraus applied the idea to software and created JotSpot. It's an idea that I only touched upon when I wrote "Integration at the Glass and the 80/20 Point". What wasn't clear to me was the economical implications.

Economic systems follow a Pareto distribution, the distibution achieves more equality as greater choices are provided to the participants. Pointers to this fact be found here. The exisitence of scarity creates the curve, however the distribution is not necessarily 80/20. It could be 50/50, that is the long tail, the disenfranchised consumers may actually consume a large chunk of the pie.

In the digital world the constraints of distribution can be easily relaxed. However, the terrific insight of Joe Kraus is that the software development world has its own fundamental constraints. Can these constraints be relaxed so that we can service the potentially billions of disenfranchised users?

During the golden days of the internet boom "Metcalfe's Law" or "Networking Effects" were the magic incantations to get Venture Capitalists knocking on your door. The emphasis was on one end of the hockey stick curve, however there might just be a new shift in perception. That straight part of the hockey stick may be more valuable than one may have assumed. In the next few years, "The Long Tail" would join the list of most common words spoken in an elevator pitch.