Beautiful Security

Platforms of the Long-Tail Variety: Why the Future Will Be Different for Us All

A “platform” is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers—users—and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

—Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape

In October 2004, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of the popular Wired Magazine, wrote an article about technology economics.^[83] The article spawned a book called The Long Tail (Hyperion) that attempts to explain economic phenomena in the digital age and provide insight into opportunities for future product and service strategies.

The theory suggests that the distribution curve for products and services is altering to a skewed shape that concentrates a large portion of the demand in a “long tail”: many different products or service offerings that each enjoy a small consumer base. In many industries, there is a greater total demand for products and services the industries consider to be “niches” than for the products and services considered to be mainstays. Companies that exploit niche products and services previously thought to be uneconomical include iTunes, WordPress, YouTube, Facebook, and many other Internet economy trends.

I fundamentally believe that information security is a long-tail market, and I offer three criteria to support this statement:

• Every business has multiple processes.

• Processes ...