Chris Blackwell’s Domain

Every once in a while a book comes along that refocuses your attitudes and changes the way you look at the world. The Long Tail for me was one of those books. The Long Tail is written by Chris Anderson who is the Chief Editor at Wired Magazine. That alone gives him a unique perspective on the world from a technologist and as a writer. Chris defines the Long Tail as a deminishing demand curve in which lesser known products are found furthur and furthur down the demand curve (the yellow area in the diagram below represents the long tail).

Chris argues that as more and more choice is becoming available to us, we are choosing products that are more tailored to ourselves and thus going down the demand curve. The book uses excellent case studies to demonstrate power of this demand. Chris focuses on the success of Netflix and Amazon as great examples of the Long Tail’s power. He continually demonstrates how a digital or virtual inventory has many advantages over a traditional inventory system, and how this will keep the Long Tail growing.

I loved this book because of it’s simplicity and how Chris takes every day examples and demonstrates how our wants are changing even if we don’t even realize it. This book is only a couple of years old but some of the “future predictions” that Chris makes have already started to come true. He predicts that in the future companies like Apple and Netflix will start to deliver movies and TV shows over the Internet (did anyone say AppleTV?). I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves digital media, but also to anyone who is in retail or marketing, and wants to start thinking about plans and strategies for the future.