Total sales of unpopular items often exceed total sales of popular items.  Consider some stats from a recent article in Wired magazine. 

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are... Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

Next think music sales.  A record store carries only the most popular items.  The ones they can sell.  But how much of a market is there for minor tracks?  Consider Rhapsody, an online music streaming service (which I subscribe to, and enjoy):

Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000.

For those of us thinking about how to make money online, there are some important consequences.  Try to think of all the really successful online businesses.  Which ones exploit the 'long tail'?  Ebay?  Clearly!  Nearly everything there is a 'one off'.  Amazon.com?  Yep, see above.  Google.  I'd guess yes; that most of their ad revenue comes from very targeted ads related to searches.  Netflix?  Again, there are thousands of movies in the 'long tail'.  I'm a Netflix subscriber.  Mostly because it's the only place in the US I can get reliable access to German language DVDs.  Any others?  Can you think of a very successful online business that doesn't rely on the long tail? 

<mathGeek> The Associated Press (AP) quotes (evidently without analysis) numbers from National Coalition of the Homeless.  They claim that there are 3.5 million homeless in the US.  Now, I don't know how many there are, and it has little to do with innumeracy.  But they then claim that their are 3,000 deaths of homeless people every year.  The focus of the article was on the tragedy of homeless deaths.  To me, even one homeless person having to die alone, and on the street is too many.  But here's where the math comes in...  3,000 deaths from 3.5 million homeless gives a death rate of 0.0857%.  That seemed suspiciously low.  A quick check of the CIA World Fact Book states that the death rate for the entire US is 8.34 deaths per thousand, or a rate of 0.834%.  So, if the numbers are correct, you are 10 times LESS likely to die if you are homeless. 

This seems highly unlikely to me, as homelessness seems, on first blush, to be less healthy than having a place to live.  However, it may be that homeless people tend to be young and healthy.  Or it could be that the at least one of the numbers given by the National Coalition of the Homeless is incorrect.  I'm guessing that the number of deaths is fairly well documented, while the number of homeless must be determined statistically.  If that's the case, a more likely number of homeless in the US would be around 350,000, assuming a mortality rate approximately equal to the rest of the population.  Once again, there may be many factors that influence the actual number, but a very quick 'reality-check' on the numbers reveals the possibility of very serious numerical errors.  (It looks like the NCH is overstating the number of homeless by 3.15 million.)  Homelessness is a very real problem, but drastically inflating the size of the problem for attention does nobody any favors.  Once people BS-meters are triggered, then it's hard to take anything else said seriously, thus damaging your cause. (Hat Tip: Wall Street Journal Online)</mathGeek>

Well, we did it!  After much hand wringing and deep conversations, we decided to hire our first 1099 employee.  Gary Gumbiner has agreed to work for the next few months on a project for Microsoft and Lionbridge.  He'll be working on designing (and possible developing) a course in IIS6 for general system administrators.  We're not making squat monetarily on the deal, however, it is allowing us more depth and capacity as a company.  That's something we're very concerned with since we've been having to turn down a great deal of work lately. 

Gary is a great guy, with experience as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on earlier MS courses.  He's also worked with 3Leaf, another great company based in Portland, Oregon.  We're happy to have him on board!

I posted earlier that I had installed X1, the fantastic (if expensive) desktop search on an earlier OS install, and that I loved it.  Well, Yahoo! has licensed it, and it's available for free download at http://desktop.yahoo.com/.  I installed the free version, and LOVE it!  Like X1, it handily beats Lookout and Google Desktop.  I highly recommend it!  By the way, if you ever search emails using the internal Outlook search, or search for files on your hard drive, you NEED a tool!  And this one is the best I've found.  A great review of Yahoo! Desktop Search can be found here.

Whoops!  I've got a Gmail account!  Interesting problem.  Google was inadvertantly placing random emails into the “Reply To” field of emails.  That's right.  Whole emails were accidentally being dropped into the “Reply To” field of someone else's email.  The good folks at Google have it fixed now.  You can read all about it at BetaNews.

OK.  I've mentioned before...  Don't even begin to install any of the Team System components without reading the Installation Guide.  Of course, if you're not an MCSE type (I know I'm not), there are certain unfortunate assumptions made.  “Set up a domain controller with all the appropriate settings.”  Uh...  OK...  And how do I do that.  Luckily, Paul Murphy (a brilliant MS employee, who also happens to be a great sailor) has a post to help us out!  Check out http://blogs.aspadvice.com/pmurphy/archive/2004/12/23/2035.aspx for all the details!  Oh, and check out his blog, too!

Merry Christmas to everyone out there!  May you have peace and joy this holiday season!  I'm off to Portland to celebrate the Christmas story with family.  See you before New Year!

The newest CTP supporting VSTS is here!  It's now available for download for those with MSDN subscriptions.  I'd highly recommend you read the installation guide BEFORE attempting to even begin the install (especially if the older CTP was any indication of the difficulty of installation for this CTP).  And, as always, go to Rob Caron's blog for the latest install news.  (Yes, he ALREADY has a post discussing the new installation script for the Dec CTP!  It's at http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2004/12/22/330396.aspx) 

This is the Guest Chat from the VSTS chat on 23 Dec 2004. Follow the "Read more" link to see the Guest Chat transcript.

The experts at Microsoft did a great job of answering several difficult questions. Follow the "Read more" link to see the Expert Answer portion of the Chat.

Once again, Microsoft shows they “Get it” when it comes to developers!  About 30 developers and other interested participants were treated to specific answers to specific questions from the VSTS team at Micrsosoft. 

MSDN India hosted the chat on VSTS at the programmer-friendly 2:30 AM PST (my time here in Seattle, so it was easy to catch before heading off to bed).  I didn't recognize all the names of the experts, but their screen names were Amit, Akash, Khushboo, Rob Caron, Keith_Rowe.  Every one of them had spot-on answers to the hard questions.  I have to admit to hogging question time, but the experts were all very gracious about it. 

I'll post a link to the chat transcript soon!  OK, time for bed!

Simon Meacham has a wonderful post on performance implications, and profiling applications.  When I talk about the importance of caching I often talk about how slow hard drive access is.  But this quote really drives it home!

Now 2GHz is a difficult thing to imagine for a human. Put simply that is 2 billion (Dr Evil pose) instructions per second at maximum throughput. So lets put this on our terms. Let's say once processor “clock cycle” is not 1/2,000,000,000 of a second but rather 1 second. On that scale accessing the nearby L1 on-chip cache takes 6 seconds, the off chip (L2) cache 2-3 minutes, and accessing main memory takes 3-4 weeks. Accessing the disk (just one disk access) by comparison takes a whopping 1 year on this timescale.

Read the whole post!  http://blogs.msdn.com/simonme/archive/2004/05/31/145024.aspx

 

Scott Duffy sometimes writes a bit about VSTS.  Not often, but enough for me to keep checking back to his blog often.  His last post had something that just struck me.  He puts it like this:

* A word about recognition: to me, recognition is simply that someone accurately understands how difficult a problem was to solve.

This rings true to me.  Which is sometimes where management makes mistakes.  Yes, it's good to congratulate someone on a job well done.  But it means so much less coming from someone who doesn't understand the job.  A “Wow!” under the breath of a fellow programmer, is far more recognition that a plaque handed out at the company Christmas party by someone unaware of what you really, really do. 

By the way, a public thanks to my business partner, Rich Hundhausen.  He's one of the finest, most professional developers I know, and when he says “Looks good.” in his understated way, it's a compliment that's difficult to match.

Thanks to Christopher Bowen for reminding me to use the Visual Studio 2005 newgroups!  There's finally a reasonable amount of traffic there, and its a great place to get your questions answered!  If a Google search doesn't get you a satisfying answer, the newsgroups should!  Plus, it's a great place for Microsoft to get feedback to improve the product. 

There are 12 different newsgroups, just in the VSTS section!  Plus you can get info on SQL CLR, C#, MSBuild and tons of other technologies!  You can check out the newsgroups via web at http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=whidbey&slcid=us or you can use your NNTP reader. 

Server: privatenews.microsoft.com

Account name: privatenews\VSUser

Password: Password

Enjoy!

“Microsoft Corp. today released a new security patch for its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser which prevents users from accidentally or intentionally downloading the new free, open-source Firefox browser from The Mozilla Foundation.“

No, it's not true.  Nor is it an urban legend.  Just a very humorous, and very short, article by Scott Ott at ScrappleFace.  Regardless of your stand on the browser wars (I'm an IE6 user), it's very funny!  You can read the whole article at http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/001990.html

You might also want to check out the other articles at ScrappleFace, too.  It's a great humor site in the spirit of The Onion but without the profanity and vulgarity. 

Coming up tomorrow morning at 2:30 am (December 23rd).  Yes, that's 2:30 AM.  Finally, Microsoft is scheduling chats during standard developer hours!  Now we won't have to drag our butts out of bed at some ungodly pre-noon hour! 

There's more chats in January, too.  Don't miss them!  I wasn't able to attend the last two, but Rich Hundhausen (also from Accentient, Inc) was.  And he got a good chunk of his questions answered right then and there!  Check them out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats.

Hat tip:  Richard Hundhausen (http://blog.hundhausen.com/)

Accentient has been contracted by Microsoft to design the first Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) course for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).  VSTS is one of the most compelling new technologies to come out of Microsoft since .NET.  It allows developers, testers, architects and even program managers to work together to build software.  Now, these types of systems are nothing new.  What IS new is the fantastic integration with Visual Studio, and the was development metrics are collected and reported.  One of the reasons developers tend to hate team tools, is that they have to open up a different application and enter things like “I'm XX% done”.  That tends to be both a hassle for the developers and a source of errors (developers seem to spend over half of any given development project at an internal estimate that they are 80% complete).  VSTS does most of this tracking automatically.  VSTS isn't just a reporting tool though; it has other wonderful features!  It brings Test Driven Development into the mainstream.  Many developers have learned the wonders of NUnit for unit testing.  VSTS now brings unit testing into the development environment.  Plus, it's extensible, so you can still use many of the unit testing tools you've gotten used to.  I'm not going to enumerate all the wonders of VSTS now, but I'll create a searchable category on this blog for “Team System”.  Come back for more posts!

Want to replicate the Apollo Guidance Computer that first brought man to the moon?  Want to do in your basement?  In your spare time?  This original took the best engineering minds in the US in the 1960s.  Now, for your do-it-yourself pleasure, the complete plans, along with helpful guidance, can be found at http://starfish.osfn.org/AGCreplica/ .  Have fun! 

Great news!  Yahoo! has licensed the X1 desktop search engine for free download.  I've used the Google Desktop, Lookout (free from Microsoft), and X1, which used to cost $99 for a personal license.  X1 was by far the best.  It's search was blazingly fast, the index was small and the UI was the simplest.  Plus, it doesn't have the security issues of Google Desktop or the Outlook start-up time impact of Lookout.

I'll be downloading it as soon as it's released, comparing it to the full version of X1.  I'll let you know how it looks.