Web 2.0 Lessons—Knowing where one stands on the Long Tail

by John Lansdale

After hearing my recent presentation on Web 2.0 you may have profound doubts about my intelligence, ability to organize or communicate but I hope you have realized, when it comes to software, that I don’t like to think about shallow things. What I’m going to say isn’t exactly well documented. My subjective warrant is many years of application development experience, countless boxes of old software on a variety of media, an attic of old magazines, a wall or two of books and multiple thousands of searches of which only Google has a record.

Web 2.0 is important enough of an idea to have survived four years in technology’s very brutal name space. I think that’s because it’s really just a name for something older. It’s had others such as excellence, total quality management and good customer service. It’s finding out what people want and giving it to them.

The trees are different but the forest is the same. The ‘Long Tail’ means profiting a little from many rather than a lot from a few. This just means “know your customer”. Don’t sell your own creativity; giving your customers the opportunity to showcase theirs means “know your product”. Retaining rights to some unreproducible part of information means work very hard. Everything else is just trees.

In computers, IBM did this first. While Univac and the other computer makers emphasized prestigious technology, IBM just made it simple for many businesses to use. The first Mac was great but Apple held on too closely to the creative part. Developing code or hardware for the Mac was very hard. Microsoft opened their operating system and its interface to anyone. Their software ran on computers IBM or anyone else built. Customized hardware and software from thousands of vendors soon swamped the fledgling Apple and took over from IBM.

Apple is back today because of a new philosophy. They kept their exclusive on hardware, not really as important now but when added up, very significant. They even kept their exclusive rights to the operating system. Underneath OS-X is the newest power, open source Linux. Yes, technically it’s UNIX based but it runs much the same code. OS-X is written with UNIX as the base, Microsoft the dregs of proprietary old DOS.

Now, Windows has come out with Vista. At the same time they’ve come out with some excellent new developers’ tools. They are flooding our attention space with one thing after another and I want to grab each one and create something with it. But something holds me back. I feel that if I put the time into learning the new tool, anything I create will belong to Microsoft, not me. They’ll soon come out with something better and my work will be obsolete. I feel like I’m on the wrong end of the Long Tail, one of the millions who each earn a penny.

John Lansdale, CDP, MCP