Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » The other side of the "long tail"

September 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)

The other side of the "long tail"

TAGS: Random

In case you missed its mention on Slashdot, the Financial Times has a funny (and telling) column today by James Boyle (Professor, Duke Law School) on the dark underbelly of the "long tail. You remember the long tail, right? It's manna from heaven - a chance for the Internet to enable a wider variety of sellers to find the wider variety of buyers than our previous markets have allowed.

Well, maybe life under the long tail isn't as rosy as life pontificating about the long tail, as Boyle discovers:

The academic in me has been very interested by the much hyped arrival of the “long tail” economy – the idea that the future lies in using the efficiency of the internet to sell smaller quantities of more goods (think of the astounding range of books on Amazon.com). One optimistic image is that thousands of small producers and entrepreneurs worldwide will be able to bypass the need for large chunks of capital and complex distribution schemes. Instead, they will be able to offer their wares direct to the public, producing a massive democratisation of production and distribution (think of Ebay).

The bookseller in me finds a rather different reality. Our centre sells books through Amazon. It was an easy choice – ubiquitous, trusted, familiar and that fabulous customer service! The speed! The responsiveness! I sometimes imagined the Amazon customer service folk borrowing the Tardis to deliver apologies for their incredibly rare mistakes before they even happened. But that was as a purchaser. As a vendor I entered into a shadowy different universe. Where Amazon’s normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, “Amazon Advantage”, the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system.

The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth. Only that could explain the strange delays of weeks in replying to emails, the apparent time distortions that will suddenly lead them to re-enter a months-long dispute in the middle, and the curiously non-terrestrial logic of their replies. When the Amazon system inserted random hieroglyphics into the description of our comic book it took many e-mails to reach a human – or at least sapient – being. When we did we were told reassuringly that Amazon’s system for updating web pages was broken and that there was no prospect of fixing it. For this, we give them 55 cents out of every dollar and an annual fee?

Funny and, as I mentioned above, pretty telling. In my world, open source is supposed to make everyone a potential developer, selling (or, at least, sharing) one's wares with other like-minded individuals. But the reality is that it's Red Hat that dominates Linux (not Mom-and-Pop Linux), MySQL that dominates open source databases, etc. People like to rally around a winner, not a tail.

Posted by Matt Asay on September 29, 2006 06:20 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: