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A View From Under the Long Tail

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the witty-retorts dept.

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."

3 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Funny

    The article, which was written by a guy, whose name is James, who shares the first name of a President, who helped create the constituion, which was written a long time ago, which is quite as old as when Communism was envisioned, which we can blame the Greeks for, which make great olive oil, which comes in extra virgin, which covers the majority of the slashdot crowd. . . .

    Oh wait, what was I talking about again?

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  2. The network effect makes competition impossible by njdj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  3. Disintermediation? BAH! by Crash+McBang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.