The Long Tail of Software
Beautiful piece here on the problems of selling specialist software to oodles of tiny niche markets:
"You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day. Overture figured it out, Google perfected it and we all know what happened from there. "