Technology's Long Tail

Chris Anderson is able to pinpoint the lives of different technologies. He can see at what point a certain technology reached its peak or when it began its decline. He speaks about the predictions made in the 1980s that were made about technology and how they all came true. When he displays the technology forecasting graph, we see a trigger. This trigger leads to a peak and that peak repeats itself later on.

Technologies go through four stages in their life. The technology hits an inflection point that determines what happens to the technology from there on. It can either fall, rise, displace another technology, or they commoditize. I like his example of the DVD. It showed the rise of DVD and the critical mass it hit throughout the years. The price drastically dropped from 2001 to 2003. DVDs now, as we all know, are virtually useless because of live streaming.

When he speaks of the word "free" as an economic force, an abundance. When you incorporate the word "free" with technology, you have a whole world of opportunity. When he explains fiber optics and phone calls, the price drop is insane. From $2.00 a minute to around $.07 a minute for a phone call to India, we can do so much more with our money. The Long Tail of Technology circulates around the fact that technology is growing quickly and there is no way we can lump everything into one-size-fits-all containers.

source: https://longtail.typepad.com/about.html

image source: https://www.frontlinesms.com/blog/2009/01/22/a-glimpse-into-social-mobiles-long-tail