The word 'Long Tail Business' became well known with the emergence of Amazon in 2006. Because the theory completely renewed how we can do business with IT.
I remember that I was shocked by the possibility of long tail business. However, recently I feel that the market is forgetting the best practice, whereas IT industry focuses on 'High Scalability'. But these two must be considered at the same time, well in my opinion.
So I am here to discuss with you again.
What is long tail business?
So Anderson wrote the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.
He is explaining that the long tail concept considers less popular goods that are in lower demand. Plus these goods could actually increase in profitability because consumers are navigating away from mainstream markets. This theory is supported by the growing number of online marketplaces that alleviate the competition for shelf space and allow an unmeasurable number of products to be sold, specifically through the internet.
Before amazon came into the market, we often bought books at stores near our houses. So the total revenue can be A in the diagram, then if we want to buy technical books which are not in the stores nearby, we walk somewhere far. However the sum of the demand of those who buy something less popular such as technical books, the B area in the diagram, will be bigger than the one of the market A.
Do we need to focus on the most popular market?
It depends. But when we design business with IT, I highly recommend long tail business.
What should be considered in terms of system
As you can see in the diagram, if the tail is long enough, the revenue of B will be bigger than one of A.
So a lot of end user will use your system. According to the article How Uber Manages A Million Writes Per Second Using Mesos And Cassandra Across Multiple Datacenters, uber's system have at least 1 billion request per second. Well how big is it?
If you think of internet banking system, the maximum transaction is normally less than 500 transactions per second. You can see how big number the uber's transaction is.
So 'High Scalability' means that system can manage tons of transactions in response to the requests.
How we can realize high scalable system?
The answer is 'Kubernetes'.
It simply enable your system mange growth of your business and system transactions.
Thank you for reading my broken english! Appreciate!