More and more data are surfacing to suggest that while we aren’t seeing the sort of explosion of niche media consumption at the scale expected in Anderson’s Long Tail, we are seeing a lessening of the power curve in a comparison between “old” and “new” media experiences.

The reasoning seems to fit with what people expect, but just to re-iterate the three major (imagined) factors):

Part of this outcome is the shift to many-to-many media—many users able to access many works (a broad catalog of music).  The catalog of available works increases, effectively surfacing a “tail” of media that previously was not easily seen.

Part of this outcome is a “relaxation” in the consumer-facing model—from product to service, if you will.  The catalog of accessible works increases, as a function of “lower transaction costs” (subscription and free services lowering the effective cost of trying out new things).

Part of this outcome is the introduction and accessibility of new mavens and connectors (to employ Gladwellian terms).  The catalog of plausibly accessible works increases given the introduction of new technologies and social actors able to introduce us to new stuff—randomly, filtered collaboratively, ideologically, or automagically.

My personal opinion would be that there will always be a head-heavy nature of experience distributions, not because of market control but simply because (1) culture is something we share (i.e., have in common and transfer among each other) and (2) some creative works are simply by their nature general in their appeal (in the same way that khaki pants go with about any shirt you wear).

I was recently asked by  M Roberston:

Don’t you think the PC to cloud transition is the type of radical change we witness rarely?

Honestly, I waffle on this one (go figure).  The cloudy movement seems like something both seemingly radical yet actually inevitable in that some dimensions of the transition are new, and other dimensions quite honestly are very deja vu (in that they already happened).

Here is how I think about it:  When everything but the screen and keyboard is located elsewhere, that is what I consider complete cloud coverage.  Everything else is a partly cloudy experience.  And in certain domains (e.g., email, money) we have been partly cloudy for quite some time.  Think about it… we store our money so far away that the physical dollar bills don’t necessarily exist.

As such, we are simply experiencing an expansion of the universe of file types, stuff and services that are capable of being hosted and that we are willing to host elsewhere.  That radical change is a fuzzy line——some parts of our bodies already crossed over, while other parts are holding back.

Will this shift affect some companies in radical ways?  Yes.  Is the shift itself radical… Probably not.  The shift to partly cloudy is just what working and living on a network naturally implies;  This shift is not a prediction, it just makes sense.

As far as the waffling:

On one hand, the general user moving what files (pictures, music, docs) they possess from a local machine to some foreign machine (or set thereof) on a network is a change—mostly behaviorally.  These folks grew up with desktops that became laptops (or laptops that become phones), yet without a ubiquitous internet connection.  As such, storing things “somewhere out there” seems radical.

On the other hand, storing things on networks seems rather instinctual to anyone for whom network access has been or has become a foregone conclusion.  Storing things “somewhere out there” seems like old hat—it is what we have been doing for some time.

Frankly, where computing started for most corporate and academic types involved working in somewhat more localized cloud formations—dumb terminals network connected to big mainframes upon which the computing and storing took place.  The thing at your desk was (for the most part) just a screen and a keyboard.  There was no hard drive within arm’s reach.

What do you think?

Let’s be honest right from the start.  The iPad is perhaps the most poorly named, awfully positioned, not-seemingly-revolutionary product that Mr Jobs has recently described as revolutionary while standing on stage.

As a product meant to appeal to the Apple fanboy, the iPad appears to be a tremendous dud.  It does not have what the fanboy needs that we don’t already get out of the combination of our MacBook(Pro) and iPhone.  In fact, on its own, the iPad is inferior to both the iPhone and a MB(P).  Its a phone without a phone (but with giant numbers).  A laptop without real guts.

The iPad is the new Brick phone.

But even the Brick spawned a market for mobile phones.  And its toward the construction of a new market that the iPad (better named) could really do something interesting.

The Church of Apple should have developed and positioned the iPad like Nintendo developed and positioned the Wii — a revolutionary-in-its-simplicity product targeted at people who are not “in the market” at the moment.  For Nintendo, this market was people who might like to play video games, but don’t need the bravado of the xBox or Playstation.  With a controller that doesn’t require 6 fingers on both hands to operate.

With the iPad the market is people who would like to have a computer-ish thing, with a simple interface and nice screen.  These are humans who are now on the sidelines of the computer world.  These people simply need a device with which they can get their email, read some news, and maybe watch a video of their grandkid. The device makes even more sense to this fringe class when combined with a reasonably priced 3G/4G connection, thereby ridding this fringe the challenge of GeekSquad managed not-so-personal Wi-Fi networks.   These folks don’t need Word or Pages, they just need GoogleDocs.  They don’t have 120GB music collections.  A computer mouse is uncomfortable, and a laptop trackpad is frustrating.  A touch screen is simple.

In Apple speak, it just works.

We should also expect to see this object in hospitals and other settings where a not-so-bulky, but reasonably processor capable device can do all that it needs to do.  Surface some patient stats, scans, and other data when you need these data.

Badly named.  Over-hyped.  Perhaps not so revolutionary.

But some people don’t need a revolution.  They just need something that works.

Susan Boyle’s most recent record has topped the charts in the UK and the US for 2009.  While this feat may seem like a big victory for the web over the radio, within these data lie a tough story that needs to be considered.

Using the back of a napkin, you can easily arrive at upwards of one billion “impressions” of Susan Boyle online and offline—moments in time when viewers, listeners or readers were treated to or focused upon she who is know as SUBO.  In fact, this one billion number may actually be a gross under-estimate.

In the context of this many impressions, Susan Boyle’s reported 5 million records sold translates to no more than a 0.5% conversion rate—less than one half of one percent of these moments translated into a sale.

The rise of SUBO may in fact be the most significant and recent evidence of the absolutely massive number of ”impressions” that must now occur in order to move consumers from indifference to action in the modern market for music.