Tail Anderson (2004) Argued That the Laws

¶ … Tail Anderson (2004) argued that the laws of supply and demand can be viewed in a different manner that can positively affect an organization's ability to create and sustain a competitive advantage within a market. Using the entertainment market as an example, he suggested that opportunities exist in fulfilling specific and unique customer demands in smaller quantity and dismiss more mainstream approaches. The purpose of this essay is to explain how the economics of abundance discussed in this article, or the long tail approach, may be applied in managing information systems.

This essay will suggest that all systems are about finding a balance point between quantity and quality and in some cases, as in the long tail scenario, they are not asymmetrical. When organizations seek to tailor the fine entertainment tastes described in Anderson's work, they discover that there are many customers who will readily spend money on attaining unique and special items. It is a growing trend to become an outsider and prefer things outside the mainstream it appears from this author's research.

I tend to agree in some aspects, but this trend itself is nothing but a temporary market correction that reflects a natural balancing effort. Information is useful based on its quality. Saying yes 500 times in a row does little to affect the affirmative properties of the word, and would soon become annoying if repeated to that point. This highlights the need to differentiate between necessary and non-necessary information. The challenges of our times is that the overload of information has created a scenario where too much information becomes non-economical.

A statistical long tail demonstrates the value in approaching those customers who lie outside the statistical main stream or collection point. There is money to be made on the outside fringes if the right approach is to be taken. Technology has placed much power in the consumer's hands and their ability to select and eventually find what they are looking for can be readily performed with information systems and inferential investigation. Outliers contain value for the society and the mainstream, has perhaps less than what was originally predicted.

To truly understand Anderson's argument means that economics flows in waves and trends that feeds on the absence of things. The human condition needs to search for that what it does not have, and making it too easy on people will cause them to look elsewhere. The mainstream is not where people are looking for to differentiate themselves.