Chris Anderson: a "professional exaggerator"?
Chris Anderson knows a thing or two about self-promotion. His first book, The Long Tail, caused a stir three years ago in its suggestion that the internet was creating a golden age for niche retailers. His latest work, Free: the Future of a Radical Price (which like The Long Tail began as a Wired article and was developed on Anderson’s blog) makes an equally sweeping claim – to plug the gap in economic thought that arises from the disappearance of prices.
However, in a review in the new August edition of Prospect, William Davies suggests that the answers Anderson provides to this problem are really little more than an extension of already existing economic models, such as Moore’s law (which predicted in 1965 that the cost of computer processing would halve every two years). Davies also crticises Anderson for being enthralled to Google, Free sometimes feeling “less like a glimpse of the future than a reverential analysis of a business model dreamt up 15 years ago”.
Still, Davies acknowledges that Anderson does have a point, if also a repetitive and slightly disingenuous way of making it. What does Free mean for the Rupert Murdochs of this world? Let us know your thoughts below.
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Chris here. Broadly I thought this was a interesting review and fair comment, but I had to laugh at this line about the Long Tail: “he exaggerated this to the point of predicting the end of the blockbuster.”
This is, rather ironically, untrue. The book never says that (instead, it says the Long Tail era represents the end of the “monopoly of the blockbuster”, but not the end of the blockbuster itself). Indeed, the main misunderstanding about the book. You could even call it an exaggeration
Surely free, like 99p, is just one of the great marketing inventions? As someone who was involved in the UK in launching ‘free calls’ on mobiles (from One2One) whose phones became used for everything from baby minding to drug dealing and pre-Ebay had a street value of £1200 on the secondary market, I think there is a big difference between selling ‘free’ and being ‘free’. Not everything has a price, but it certainly has a value.
As I comment on Mr.Davies blog Potlatch – in my exaggerated opinion, the future is anti-price : )
Thanks for your response, Chris. I concede that I have exaggerated this reference to The Long Tail!
However, I think it’s fair to say that business claims that were made for the long tail have not (yet) been empirically validated. I guess that could change. I still think the thesis worked, simply not as an accurate prediction. It worked inasmuch as it got people to understand something that was simply and structurally different about online retail. And you would not have pulled that off by making tentative, nuanced and anxiously realistic predictions. Exaggeration cuts through better and brings more people with it.