Short tale of The Long Tail

With gasoline climbing uncomfortably close to five bucks a gallon, our manufacturing sector about to get statutorily clobbered, and home electricity bills that are higher than many car payments, happy thoughts are hard to come by. Sure, our pipe-dream crowd, which has long provided belly-laughs and entertainment to outside observers, still has Rainbow Schemes, but the pathetic impotence of these chronic talkers seems to accentuate Saipan’s utter helplessness. So, isn’t there any good news to be had?

Well, yes. In a way. Sort of. If you’re looking for an optimistic context to consider, at least from a broad perspective, take a look at a new paperback book titled The Long Tail, scribed by Chris Anderson (Hyperion Press, $14).

Anderson, a former writer for The Economist magazine, and now editor in chief of Wired magazine, has a premise that we already know: The Internet is changing the economic landscape, at least insofar as marketing and selling go.

The playing field for commerce is being leveled by the Internet. A small place like Saipan no longer means, necessarily, being consigned to the peripheral death row of market access. Thanks to the twin blessings of the U.S. postal service and an excellent Internet infrastructure, Saipan, cyber-wise, is essentially as close to mainland buyers as Chicago or New York are. OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, and it wouldn’t apply if you’re trying to sell my hidden, five-ton stash of used copper, but you get my point.

Still this does, or can, hold promise for certain types of small-scale enterprises. In fact, I’ve seen two Saipan-based small outfits do just that, they sold stuff to the mainland, though one eventually threw in the towel, and the other moved off-island (and is still a going, and growing, concern).

And in the services realm, it’s easy to understand that a graphic artist, or a writer, or a financial analyst, or a Web page writer, or a computer programmer, can deliver their services from Saipan just as well as they could from Los Angeles. Besides, those 3:42am calls from clients will keep you on your toes; what could be better?

The term “long tail,” by the way, refers to the nether regions of the normal curve (it’s a statistics thing). The point is that the efficiencies of the Internet have opened up the otherwise too-small-to-care-about market niches that are far from the Big Money Middle.

In other words, as some people like to say, “little is the new big.” Little companies selling their products to little niches of little markets are getting a bigger aggregate share of commerce. That, by the way, is a huge concept. One example of this powerful mechanism is, of course, eBay.

The Long Tail is extremely well-written. The book also includes some very insightful information and data on the retailing industry. Anderson spins some good yarns, too, and gives, for example, an interesting thumbnail sketch of how the mighty Sears company was founded.

I will admit that much of the book was skip-over material for me, given that it dwells, at length, on the entertainment industry. But if that’s your cup of tea, you’ll find a mighty big serving of it.

The long tail effect certainly won’t provide a bunch of jobs for Saipan. It won’t replace the garment industry. Nor will it find employment for those who lack genuine, market-based skills; so as great as the Internet is, eBay can’t hand out patronage jobs.

Still, for what remains of Saipan’s private sector, The Long Tail is an inspiring, thoughtful, and informative look at a phenomenon that we’re all involved with, but that we have a hard time getting real perspective on. This is a great book, and it comes along at a great time for many of us, as we strive to find some genuine reasons for optimism.

Best of all, as of yesterday, BestSeller books had four copies in stock, which does go to show you that even in the cyber-age, a good brick-and-mortar store is still a blessing to be heeded.