Information Maven: Greg Meyer

You’ve probably heard a lot about Chris Anderson’s Book The Long Tail The Long Tail lately.

A strong rebuttal appeared in the Wall Street Journal recently. Here’s an excerpt and opinion.

And Anderson’s reply:

And a slightly more reasoned review.

My take after actually reading the book? I think Anderson has some very interesting points. In businesses where the cost of carrying more inventory and/or providing more products and services to the customer drops close to zero, those businesses will be more successful on the Internet. Case in point: iTunes. Other businesses, like Amazon.com, might be more successful than their brick-and-mortar counterparts because of their ability to offer a mass-customization experience to every customer, but are doomed to failure unless they can push their inventory costs on to other retailers (which they are doing adeptly, by the way).

Amazon’s true value, if you look at it in a “Long Tail” power law way, might be in offering customized recommendations for you no matter where you shop on the net, then offering the tools to make that transaction as easy as possible to happen. But then there’s Google Checkout, which could be ready to take away market share from Amazon very soon.