Review # 26 Long Tail
The world is changing, surprisingly some companies do not quite aware of this change and that can be extremely dangerous.
It’s quite certain that 90% of the companies that still conduct business the same way 5 years from now will be out of business.
Change is inevitable, do you have the “change strategy” in place yet?
The long tail suggests the phenomena where most individual now have their own version of how they perceived themselves to be and do not want “one size fits all” products and services anymore. We can no longer categorized the client to be in age, sex, income or other demographics as before. The diversity of cultures and interests are far beyond that.
Therefore, market is now looking for more of an individualization and will jump to it when its available. The need to be “unique” is much stronger now than anytime in our history and the tools in the market allow that to happen as well.
Chris Anderson defined the long tail phenomena as follows
- The tools of production become widely available
- The costs of distribution are cut appreciably.
- Some way of connecting supply and demand is established.
Perhaps the easiest example is to look at your friends’ iphone, you will find out that no two iphones are alike. It basically customed to fit each person’s lifestyle and interests. This is the simplest example and if you look around you will see much more.
Let’s see
Do you know how many variations you can get in Starbucks?
guess...guess....guess
19,000
Wow, this means that I can go in to Starbucks everyday for the rest of my life without having to order the same coffee ever again.
Another issue is demonstrated via the 20/80 concept.
For those who knows me personally, you probably know that I was a big fan of 20/80 however I do have to agree with the author that the below curve of 80 has a great potential (which normally underrated). To capture this potential, the important element is to understand how the information travels.
The world of invisible market has turned visible. The long tail market is a multi billion dollar business.
I would like to take part of the book that kind of sum it all up. If you not going the read the entire book at least read the next paragraph.
“For around $30,000, you can now buy a machine called a Solidscape T66 3-D printer for your home. A 3-D printer is a domestic factory, capable of manufacturing almost anything in lot sizes of one. 3-D printer us a laser to turn a bath of liquid polymer or power into hard plastic in any shape you desire. Feed it a 3-D object file, such as the output of a CAD program or even the screen captured polygon file of a character from a video game, and the laser will go to work tracing it out. Layer by layer, a perfect plastic reproduction of the object emerges out of the bath. It’s like magic. Someday, they may be as common as inkjets and not much more expensive. Just think about what that might enable. As 3-D printing technology extends beyond brittle plastics to range of materials, from metals to synthetic fibers, we may be able to self-manufactured spare parts, toys, perhaps even entire machines that we’ve downloaded from some virtual retailer. Today you can print your own photographs at home, tomorrow you may print the frame, too Like everything else, tomorrow’s long tail of things will be aggregated, efficiently stored as bits, and then delivered to your home via optical fiber. Only then will it be materialized, coming full circle to atoms again at the point of consumption. It sounds like science fiction, but then again so did having an entire music library in your pocket just a decade ago. In the worlds of entertainment and information, we’ve already lost the capacity constraints of shelf space and channels, along with their one-size-fits-all constraints. Soon we may lost in our culture thanks to digital efficiencies will extend to every part of our lives. The question tomorrow will not be whether more choice is better, but what do we really want? On the infinite aisle, everything is possible. ”
One flaw about this book is that I don’t like the way they arrange the paragraphs. It’s kind of difficult to read.
All in all, it’s a nice read.
8.5/10
Cheers
Tab
