The Long Tail of software

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, has a new company that's based on what he calls the Long Tail of software. Called JotSpot, it's building a wiki-like platform that makes it easy for firms to create custom applications for their specific business needs, much as they do with Excel spreadsheets today. He briefed me about this some time ago, but I wasn't able to talk about it until now. Fortunately, he's done all the talking for me with a really interesting post on his own blog that nicely shows how broadly the Long Tail theory can be applied.

The long tail doesn’t just apply to music and movies. There’s a long tail for software as well. Here’s why.

First, every business has multiple processes. Things like hiring, firing, selling, ordering, etc. Second, while some of these are pretty common in name from business to business (recruiting, for example), in practice, they are usually highly customized. Finally, there are simply a large number of processes that are either unique or that are common to millions of very small markets and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to buy software for (for example, the process by which an architecture firm communicates between it’s clients and the city planning office).

These three facts

• every business has multiple processes
• processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
• there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.

means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.

Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

There are also loads of great charts illustrating the point in a ppt file you can download from his site here.

Comments

[Mike Harper]

Great post. Encouraging for IT contractors like me who, come to think of it, provide services in the long tail.

I met someone who worked for a manufacturing company and was implementing a SAP-like package. What if it didn't fit the business's processes? He was planning to make the processes fit the software!

I don't know how this story ended. But it seems to me the unique way business processes evolve might be critical to the company's success. Off-the-peg solutions without customisation could undermine that, making a company less competitive.

[Firefox Fan]

It seems that what is really needed is something similar to the Firefox extension model. While it is impossible to create an entire suite that perfectly meets the needs of millions of businesses, it is possible to make a simple core that accepts highly-tailored extensions that do one particular thing extremely well. The market for the plug-in may be just 1000 businesses, but it takes only 2 man-months to create it, not the man-decades needed for the all-in-one solution.

[Mark Tosczak]

So here's the interesting question: books, music, web search, software. What other categories of business might it be possible to build a Long Tail business on? Are only information-based business (i.e. digital) susceptible to this?

[chris anderson]

Mark,

The answer is that there are lots of them. I've already discussed Google (LT of advertising) and eBay (hard goods), but there are many others. But I've promised my publisher I'd save something substantial for the book, so you'll just have to read about there ;-)

[anon]

sounds a lot like clay shirky's essay on situatied software...

[bob]

Economist on long tail of software. May require password.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=3713975

Let me know if you need a copy.

[Amir K]

bob,

would you please e-mail me that economist piece at amir@amiran.com or just copy and paste it here in the discussion board.

Thanks

Amir

[Jonathan Sapir]

For a detailed analysis of long tail software tools, take a look at www.longtailsoftware.com.

[BillyWarhol]

my gosh March 10, 2005!!!

back when i first joined Flickr + caught the whole Web2.0 bug*

i was hoping to get on yer Mailing List for Long Tail Software Dev but the Link doesn't work?

amazing Blog btw*

[steven davies]

the software industry is going through a quet revolution., Software's Share of the IT Budget will grow from 30% to 35% in 2008 according to a CIO.The tale continue.

[Wesley Tanaka]

Isn't the difference that the consumer tells the producer what's needed in custom software, but with music and movies, it's the producer telling the consumer. Mass market software is more similar to music and movies, but there's been a lively market there for a long time already.

[Tom Grimshaw]

Couldn't agree more! We have been satisfying long-tail needs for a dozen years now. Probably would have made more money going after a vertical market niche!

We are currently rebuilding our mini-ERP package to be even more customisable and configurable, even to the point of allowing a user to create custome data entry forms that handle data inserts to multiple tables.

Must go check out some of the links in the post comments.