De Longtail en software ontwikkeling

Chris Anderson heeft weer een mooie posting over de Longtail geschreven. Het gaat hierbij om een nieuwe benadering voor de ontwikkeling van software. De gedachte hierachter is dat miljoenen gebruikers hun eigen templates maken in bijvoorbeeld excell en dat je daar een marktplaats voor kunt maken om al die ontwikkelkracht uit te nutten:

Joe Kraus of Jotspot was the first to really develop a Long Tail framework for software, which I wrote about here. As he pointed out, you can think of the many thousands of Excel templates that have been created over the years by individuals for their specific needs as small, targeted software applications running on a common platform. Although they probably didn’t think of it this way, each of those accountants, project leaders and HR managers was acting as a software developer of sorts. But the “software” they developed was rarely used by anyone outside their company, and it was limited by the constraints of the platform--Excel--on which it ran.

The old commercial software model was, like so many others, largely hit-driven. Software companies developed bloated one-size-fits-all software applications for big markets, and then left the customizing of that software to IT consultants or the users themselves. As Joe put it, “the traditional focus has been on dozens of markets of millions instead of millions of markets of dozens.”

Je kunt hier een online presentatie vinden van Chris Anderson over de Longtail.