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A View From Under the Long Tail
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a funny article by James Boyle in the Financial Times on what it really feels like to be part of the long tail economy." From the article: "Where Amazon's normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, 'Amazon Advantage', the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system. The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth."
Fund/find an alternative, and you will see Amazon fix itself.
A major point of the article is that this is not possible because of the network effect - people who want to buy a book online go to Amazon, because Amazon has all the books and "just works".
As the article puts it:
As an academic, I am very interested in network effects - the curious economic features of networks, which increase in value as they increase in size. Does this mean that customers will be "locked in" to the system that achieves ubiquity? (...) Does this threaten the efficiency that the networked economy was supposed to provide? As a vendor, I fume and rant, but am unable to convince myself that we can shift distributors: will the people who want our books trust an unfamiliar name?
Looks great at first, then you realize they've changed one middleman for a different, 'internet based' one. The only folks who come out ahead on this deal are UPS, FEDEX, and USPS.
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
There is a house in Steatham on the A11 in the UK that does its own ebaying - whenever I drive past they have a range of goods sitting by the side of the road with hand drawn price boards.
The road transport system = the new ebay. People could club together to sell things and you could call them -- Oh I don't know -- Markets or Shops....