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June 28, 2005
Chris Anderson Get Peeved About Misuse of "Long Tail"
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The fuzzy wuzzy usage of the Long Tail term has led Chris Anderson to author What the Long Tail isn't:
There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe". Invoking the Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you've got. The Long Tail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor-selling product. Or weak sectors. Or bad ideas.
The fact that something isn't popular doesn't mean that it's just a matter of time before it will benefit from all sorts of powerful demand-creation Long Tail effects. More likely, it's just not good enough to be commercially interesting, and probably never will be.
Most of the "niche" products in the tail are simply crap.
I have stumbled across the growing proliferation of the Long Tail in a lot of odd places. I got a piitch from some entrepreneurs about a 'long tail' social tool where the term was really out of context, for example. As Tim Oren points out, Chris had better get his book done before all the chewy goodness has been sucked out of the term.
Comments (3)
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1. Kris on June 28, 2005 02:43 PM writes...
just one more example of consultant leeches and entrepreneur wannabes without any original thoughts of their own latching onto and sucking the life juices out of the next buzzword-du-jour in an effort to ride someone else's original thinking.
Permalink to Comment2. Randy on June 28, 2005 03:51 PM writes...
CHeck out this blog post about the long tail from a designer's perspective.
Permalink to Commenthttp://blog.rebang.com/index.php?p=265
3. Ed Batista on June 28, 2005 06:48 PM writes...
Not to defend "consultant leeches and entrepreneur wannabes," but I think overuse of the Long Tail concept stems from a logical desire to find some shorthand for all these Pareto/power law distributions we encounter everywhere, and put them into a context that makes them easier to understand.
People may be applying the concept willy-nilly, and they may be drawing far-fetched conclusions, but that's the downside of easily graspable shorthand--it makes it as easy to communicate both good AND bad ideas.
Tim Oren has a recent post on buzzword abuse that's relevant here. In response to a question about why the tech industry is so quick to seize upon buzzwords, Tim wrote "Because detecting and analyzing a pattern in development of technology, to the point where it is a useful predictive tool, can require skills ranging across analysis of a platform's APIs, the prospects for nanometer scale fabrication, transactions costs economics effects, user's acceptance of new interfaces and form factors, Internet impacts on distribution and supply channels, just to name a few. It's a rare head that combines skill in enough of these domains to grasp all the factors likely to drive the trajectory of a particular technology. When that knowledge is combined with business sense, you get a Bill Gates. The rest of us need to find a way to speak to others whose knowledge is in different domains, who can't understand the minutiae, or command the intuition, that we have in our fields, and vice versa." (Read it all at http://due-diligence.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/addicted_to_buz.html)
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