The Long Tail

by Chris Anderson

  In early 2003, Microsoft seemed to have hit rock bottom in its public image. It was still under the cloud of the antitrust investigations that had dogged it through most of the late nineties, its share price had flatlined, and Google had taken the crown as the cool company of technology.

  Microsoft couldn’t seem to change the way it was seen. And when you think of it, that’s not surprising. For decades the public face of the company has been two men—Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Whatever you think of them is what you think of Microsoft. If you think of them as predatory monopolists, there’s very little they can say to change your mind. And if you think that they are constitutionally unable to create products that generate the kind of consumer loyalty and delight that Apple can, well, that’s not something an advertising campaign or press release is going to solve.

  This was the thought that kept running through Len Pryor’s head as he returned from another Microsoft developers conference. He was a Microsoft manager in charge of “platform evangelism,” but it was getting harder and harder each year. Code writers were beginning to see a growing demand for apps that ran on Linux and on Apple’s machines. Companies like Yahoo and Google were doing all the really interesting stuff online. And the emergence of the Web 2.0 movement meant that the tools to write software that ran in Web browsers, rather than on a PC desktop, were cheap and powerful enough to launch a thousand startups, most of which had no need for Microsoft’s software at all.

  Pryor had experimented with running a blog at a developers conference in late 2003, and it had been a huge hit. But when the conference was over, so was the blog. How could Microsoft extend that way of communicating throughout the year and beyond the hard-core developers who attend such conferences?

  As it happened, Pryor used to be afraid of flying. A close friend had survived a near-crash in the early nineties, and it affected Pryor deeply. The idea of putting his life in the hands of two pilots he didn’t know gave him panic attacks. Before boarding a plane, he was routinely sick to his stomach, and he spent most of each flight alternately meditating and gripping his armrests in fear. Then he met a pilot for Delta Air Lines. Pryor quizzed the pilot about every detail of flying jetliners, how many backup systems they had, what it would take to make a plane fall out of the sky. It worked. By getting inside the pilot’s head, he came to understand how safe flying actually is.

  Call it process transparency—the more you know about how a system works, the more confidence you have in it.

  This is the same philosophy that United Airlines had in mind when it decided to let passengers listen in to cockpit-to-tower communications on channel 9 of the in-flight audio program. If the plane hits a sickening bump and you can hear the pilot and air traffic control chatting about flight-plan trivia, you feel calmed by the sheer ordinariness of their conversation.

  Pryor wondered if a similar method would help people understand Microsoft better. If he could make it easier for outside programmers to get to know the company’s engineers—to make the company’s development process more transparent—they wouldn’t be as wary of Microsoft.

  In December 2003, Pryor pitched his idea to Vic Gundotra, the general manager in charge of developer relations. It was, he now concedes, a tad ambitious. “I was proposing reality TV with cameras in every conference room,” he told Wired’s Fred Voglestein. “I wanted to post the specifications for our software—to go completely open source. Vic told me to back off a bit, but he loved the concept.” Gundotra gave him two months and $20,000 to get the initiative off the ground. Pryor outfitted a team of five people, himself included, with camcorders and turned them loose on the company to interview engineers about their jobs and their products. The idea was to post the clips—unvetted and largely unedited—to a Web site that anyone, inside or outside the company, could see and comment on.

  This was, on the face of it, preposterous. How could Pryor bypass Microsoft’s lawyers, PR people, executives, and marketers? What if Channel 9’s cameras accidentally showed intellectual property jotted on a whiteboard? What if a subject got flustered on camera and said something he shouldn’t? What was to be done about a brilliant engineer who looked like a disheveled kook?

  Channel 9 launched on April 6, 2004, and two things were immediately clear: The fears of the lawyers, marketers, and PR consultants would, in fact, be realized—and it would be good for the company. One of the first videos posted on Channel 9, an interview with researcher Bill Hill, was a perfect example. Hill’s hair could have used a comb and his beard a trim. Meanwhile, his topic—“Windows is not the most important operating system”—was very much off message. His point to programmers: Humans, not software, are the critical operating framework. The interview was wacky and thoughtful and clearly not something PR would have approved, much less produced. But it was a huge hit and is still one of the more popular videos on the site.

  “Who told you you could do this? I want a meeting with your VP,” read an email from a marketing executive in the Windows division. “Some of the information in the last video was false. Do you realize shareholders could sue us over this?” an attorney pinged. And then there were the dozens of awkward hallway run-ins: Someone in public relations or marketing would stop Pryor and ask, in effect, “Who do you think you are?” But Pryor’s bosses backed him and kept the censors at bay.

  The site proved wildly popular with the rank and file. But ultimately it was Channel 9’s instant success with the target audience—independent developers—that ensured its survival. By the end of the first day, word of mouth had drawn 100,000 viewers. Half a year later, traffic was up to 1.2 million unique visitors a month. Today, Channel 9 has nearly 4.5 million unique monthly visitors. It’s posted more than 1,500 videos.

  You may have heard of Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger who became a Web celebrity, winning over software developers with bracingly candid posts about his employer. (He left for a podcasting startup in late 2006.) But Scoble was just the most visible face of the transparency revolution Channel 9 ignited inside Microsoft. In fact, the 71,000-employee company now has more than 4,500 bloggers posting on every imaginable tech topic, from startups to SQL. There’s Larry Hryb, Xbox LIVE’s director of programming, who blogs two or three times a day under the pen name Major Nelson—his Xbox LIVE handle—and does a weekly podcast. His posts have made conventional PR for the Xbox all but obsolete. If you want to see the most authoritative and timely Microsoft information about the gaming system, you can find it on Major Nelson’s blog.

  Today, Microsoft is less a monolithic company headed by two titans, and more a collection of thousands of people pretty much like us. Whatever Microsoft product you use or have an interest in, there’s an engineer or product manager carrying on a conversation in public about it. None have Scoble-sized audiences, but the quality of the conversation is all the better for their niche focus.

  I happen to be interested in Microsoft Media Center video and music software, and I subscribe to a few of the blogs of the members of that team. A typical post will discuss the internal debate over how to display an album when the cover art is not available: Should they use a pretty proportional font or a less attractive fixed width one that keeps the display of the entire “shelf” of albums more consistent? It’s a trivial point and of no interest to the vast majority of Microsoft consumers, but it was of interest to me, and when the final product came out and had adopted the convention I’d voted for, I felt a surge of loyalty and affection that I don’t normally feel for Microsoft software.

  Microsoft used to count on its huge PR operation to manage its reputation. Now it’s turned that over to its employees. Where does that leave PR?

  The usual role of sending press releases to traditional media will probably continue as long as there is traditional media. But what about the Long Tail of media—all those new influentials, from the micromedia of Techcrunch and Gizmodo to individual bloggers? And the social news aggregators like Digg and Reddit (which, in full disclosure, we at Wired own)?
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  They’re where the most powerful sort of marketing—word of mouth—starts, but most of them don’t want to hear from a PR person at all. Blogging is all about authenticity and the individual voice, not paid spin. Many bloggers seem just culturally mismatched with the preternaturally positive PR professionals, and woe to the flack who’s busted trying to game Digg without revealing that he or she is paid to do so.

  So now imagine that you’re one of those PR professionals. What do you do? Stick with the world you know, and continue calling and emailing releases to the traditional press (trying not to notice that their ranks are shrinking and their influence is waning)? Start spamming bloggers, too, and hope for the best? Or just treat alpha bloggers like traditional press and shower them with love while ignoring the rest?

  I’ve seen all three of those paths taken, some of them even with modest success. Despite the culture mismatch, there certainly are plenty of bloggers who actually don’t mind hearing from a PR person, as long as it’s in the form of a personal email or comment that reflects that the flack actually reads the blog and gets what it’s about. And companies such as Microsoft and Sun are now shifting their PR strategy to give special attention to influential bloggers, inviting them to private briefings and giving them early looks at new products.

  But fundamentally social media is a peer-to-peer medium; bloggers would rather hear from someone doing something cool than from the paid promotional representative for that person. The problem is that the people doing that cool stuff are busy, which is why they pay PR people to do the outreach for them in the first place.

  I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves.

  Here’s a start at a curriculum for such in-house social media coaching:

  Who’s influential in our space (and how we know)

  What/who influences them

  How to get Digged

  Effective blogging

  Using beta-test invite lists as marketing

  The art of begging for links

  Stunts, contests, gimmicks, memes, and other link bait

  Sharing versus oversharing; how to know when what you’re doing is ready to be talked about.

  Abigail Johnson, one PR professional, put this shift best: “In some ways, the Long Tail is taking us back to the fundamentals of human communication: used to be before media and then mass media that the only way to get the word out about anything was word of mouth. And because that was an evolutionary thing and people didn’t spend a lot of time trying to hype, more often than not, the true essence of an entity just emerged in the market.”

  So far I’ve been talking mostly about online marketing. But it’s been fascinating to watch the cultural fragmentation and nicheification that defines the online world influence the offline world, too. Not long ago Berkeley, California, where I live (despite my general antipathy for anything evoking hippies, the sixties, or hot tub spirituality), was the very definition of fringe. This is where people came to escape the mainstream, not define it. Yet today the organic and artisanal food movements, hybrid cars, green consumers, and socially conscious businesses—all of which took root in countercultural hubs such as Berkeley—are changing the consumer landscape from Wal-Mart to prime-time TV.

  Take chocolate. Between the Swiss and Hershey, surely everything that can be done to create a new market for cacao beans has already been done. Yet not so long ago they said the same about that other bean that we pay Starbucks three dollars for every morning. Never underestimate the power of discovering meganiches in what was formerly thought a commodity.

  Today, chocolate is fast becoming the new coffee. Or wine. Or beer. Or bread. Or tea. Or olive oil. All of those were decommoditized once some clever entrepreneur realized that there was a great market at the end of the Long Tail, which just so happened to be where the richest consumers with the most refined taste were all along, waiting for someone to recognize that there was latent demand outside the one-size-fits-everyone model.

  I visited my friend Louis Rossetto’s new artisanal chocolate company TCHO to see this firsthand. The first thing they told me about were the astounding stats on Long Tail chocolate. In the U.S., the chocolate market as a whole is essentially flat, growing no faster than population and inflation. But “premium” chocolate is growing by 16 percent a year. Within “premium” there are several niches that are growing even faster. Organic chocolate is growing by 70 percent a year and “fair trade” chocolate is growing by an estimated 2,000 percent annually (albeit from a very small base).

  The new niche chocolatiers are following a road map established by the coffeemakers before them. Rather than buy bulk chocolate and then mix and mold it like most of the others in their industry (derisively called “remelters” by the new artisanal chocolatiers), they are buying beans from the source and then tracking their progress through each shipment, fermentation, drying, and grind. When you buy a TCHO bar, there is a code on it that you can enter into a Web site and watch the path of the beans that made it from field to store on Google Earth. At each stop on the way you can see videos of what happens and the people who do it. Each batch is different, involving a different combination of supplier, intermediaries, and processes. For consumers who care about that, it’s all available.

  It’s a PhD in globalization in every bite.

  Information has value. People will pay more to know where their food comes from, whether to ensure its quality or the economic wellbeing of the workers along the way. What other products could be decommoditized this way?

  In a sense, the rise of organic, artisanal, and similar “craftsman” agricultural products harkens back to an earlier time of local farmers, hand production, and traditional skills. So why include this as part of a twenty-first century technology-driven cultural shift? Because it reflects the mainstreaming of the niche. And that, in turn, stems from a whole series of modern truisms about developed-world culture: affluence (niche products often cost more), increasingly refined and informed taste, tolerance and even preference for diversity, and distribution channels (from Whole Foods to Starbucks) with more capacity for variety than ever before in history.

  And then there’s the Web. Forget it as a marketplace of products, and instead think of it as a marketplace of opinion. It’s the great leveler of marketing. It allows for niche products to get global attention. Most products will be sold offline, much as they always were. But in the years to come, more and more products will be marketed online, taking advantage of the ability of Web methods to fine-slice consumer groups and influence word of mouth more effectively than ever before in history. Not all industries lend themselves to an infinite variety of products, but all industries have an infinite variety of customers. Finally we can treat them like the individuals they are. It’s the sunset of the thirty-second spot.

  CODA: TOMORROW’S TAIL

  For around $5,000, you can now buy a machine called a Desktop Factory 3D printer for your home. It’s a beautiful piece of desktop engineering, although still a bit expensive. But the price is falling fast, just as laser printers did a decade ago, and it’s the sort of radical technology that can set the imagination soaring. Remember the LEGO Factory story, in which you could design models, upload them, and have the kits delivered a week or two later? Well, you can now take out the waiting for delivery part. A 3D printer is a domestic factory, capable of manufacturing almost anything in lot sizes of one. Someday, they may be as common as inkjets and not much more expensive. Just think what that might enable.

  Today’s 3D printers come in various types, but a common one uses a laser to turn a bath of liquid polymer or powder into hard plastic in any shape you desire. Feed it a 3-D object file, such as the output of a CAD program or even the screen-captured polygon file of a character from a video game, and the laser will get to work tracing it out. Layer by layer, a perfect plastic reproduction of the obje
ct emerges out of the bath. It’s like magic. The Desktop Factory printer can turn bits into atoms in your own home. It’s the ultimate manufacturing technology for the Long Tail of things.

  As 3D printing technology extends beyond brittle plastic to a range of materials, from metals to synthetic fabrics, we may be able to self-manufacture spare parts, toys, perhaps even entire machines that we’ve downloaded from some virtual retailer. We already have that power for digital goods: Today you can choose to have Amazon ship you tax software in a box in ten days or simply download it and run it right now. Other services offer you the same choice for music: a CD next week or the digital tracks now. But someday that may also extend to physical goods. Today you print your own photographs at home; tomorrow you may print the frame, too.

  You can get a glimpse of this already. Will Wright, the legendary video-game designer, is putting the finishing touches on his next game, Spore. In it, you’ll be able to evolve your own creature, imbuing it with traits and characteristics of your own design. If you like your work, you’ll be able to upload the creation to the Spore servers. And then, for about $20, you can have it 3D printed into a real action figure—colors, texture, and all. Each one is unique and will show up at your front door in a matter of a week or two. Think of it as the Long Tail of merchandising, and a mind-blowing glimpse of what’s still to come.

  Like everything else, tomorrow’s Long Tail of Things will be aggregated, efficiently stored as bits, and then delivered to your home via optical fiber. Only then will it be materialized, coming full circle to atoms again at the point of consumption. It sounds like science fiction, but then again so did having an entire music library in your pocket just a decade ago.