Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, author of "The Long Tail" (blog)
I didn't actually take notes during Chris Anderson's talk - but it was pretty good (I'm a big fan of the "Long Tail" concept). I did grab a couple of his slides, however, that I'll try to annotate:
Remember the water cooler?
The neat thing about this slide was the point that Mr. Anderson made about consumer choice -- the more choice that consumers have (in this case TV channels to watch), decreases the channel that everyone watches at one point in time. As the Internet allows us to essentially have "infinite" channels, that means that the era of the "hit" is going to forever disappear. I'm not sure that hits will go away forever (things tend to be annoyingly cyclic), but it is certainly gone for the foreseeable future.
Another interesting fact (that wasn't shown) is that even as the eyeballs-per-hit-show have gone steadily down, the ad revenue per hit show has gone up. I believe that this trend may now finally be coming to an end, which is really going to start to disrupt the media companies (in a way that 500 channel satellite TV never did).
20th Century Markets
The point here is that 20th century markets, due to the physical constraints of the realm (shelf space, TV bandwidth, radio bandwidth, etc.) offered less variety, therefor forcing the market to work in a hit-driven way.
21st Century Markets
In 21st century markets, the physical constraints melt away (Amazon has essentially unlimited shelf space, YouTube limitless "channels") - so it is possible (and lucrative!) to monetize the long tail - lower volume, more niche.
What has held the software tail back?
It is interesting to think about the Long Tail of software. This basically refers to software applications that have a limited audience. The example that Mr. Anderson gave was software for bicycle shops - something that Microsoft would never target, but that doesn't mean it isn't needed, or that it can't be delivered profitably.
Long Tail software timeline
What's interesting, to me, is that not only are people using today's technologies to better-serve the Long Tail of software better than ever before, but people started building businesses around this market years ago (i.e. Salesforce AppExchange, JotSpot). The prescience of that fact amazes me.