Systems Thinkers

An interesting blog posting from Chris Anderson, author of the book “The Long Tail” and editor of Wired. Quoting at some length from Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) and others, he argues that his basic message – that businesses could make as much money from a large number of product lines each with small revenue, as from a small number of products each with large revenue – is no longer completely accurate. In particular, he notes that the distribution of companies that do well from the Long Tail is very skewed, and that only quite a small number (Google, Amazon etc) do well. He concludes that “It’s hard to make money in the Tail. As Schmidt notes, it’s also hard to make money if you don’t have a Tail (to satisfy minority taste, which improves the consumer experience), but the revenues are disproportionately in the Head.”