Long tail software emerges
Posted by Hoon in Market News, March 25th, 2008
Joe Kraus published his blog post “The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens.” back in March 2005. Now, after a relatively quiet period of 3 years, we are starting to see the dawning of awareness about the disruptive power of long tail software.
The first person to address this is Fred Chong with his paper “Application Marketplaces and the Money Trail” (the image is from the paper). In it, Fred describes 4 forces that are stimulating the long tail software economy. These include:
- Democratizing the tools of production. Tools like Coghead and iBuild mean you don’t have to be a programmer anymore to build software applications.
- Democratizing distribution. As I mentioned in a previous post, cloud computing from companies like Amazon make it easy, convenient and inexpensive to deploy fully scalable applications .
- Connecting supply and demand. Application galleries are being offered by companies like Coghead, Salesforce and Facebook, making it much easier for consumers to find the application they are looking for.
- Democratizing Monetization. Ad-funded, subscription and transaction models make it easier for ISV’s to make money from their applications.
The long tail software revolution is officially in play…