I found a reference to a new noun called the "longtail" today. Wikipedia has a nice page:The Long Tail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It occurred to me that this is similar to a concept that Bob Wood taught me (and so many other students) long ago about support. That is to say, there are lots of problems that fit into the longtail, so I can focus on automating support for items that are not in the longtail. Then individual support goes into only cases which fit into the longtail.
I tend to (mistakenly) treat every problem like it's in the fat part of the distribution. This concept applies to programming as well.
Posted by jreynold at March 28, 2005 01:18 PM