Oh, and I forgot to mention this in that post:
Today I started reading The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, WIRED editor. (That despite the fact that I still haven't finished Star Wars: Dark Lord...) And it's really good. Very interesting. Neat graphs.
In essence, with e-retailers like iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon, and eBay, if you put the product out there it will find a market, no matter how small, no matter how niche. And with little or no distribution costs and no shelf space to waste, in the past decade or so it's actually started to make economic sense. Rhapsody still regularly sells copies of it's 100,000th most popular song, and so on. The long tail gets very close to zero the farther out from the "hits" you go, but it never quite reaches zero, and you have so much quantity way out there in the tail that combined it can still make up a huge part of, say, Amazon's total revenues.
Very very interesting. And it applies to just about anything these days - Google, Netflix, you name it...
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