Chapter 20 Tail statement day's long tail

Right now, you can buy a home machine called the Solidscape T66 3D printer for around $30,000.It's a fantastic piece of desktop technology, albeit still a bit pricey.But prices are already falling fast, and it's cutting-edge technology that lets imaginations run wild.Remember the story of the LEGO factory? - You can design mockups, upload them, and receive your own creation within a week or two.Now, you can take the hassle out of waiting for delivery.A 3D printer is a home factory that can produce multiple models of almost any product.Someday, they may be as common as laser printers, and not much more expensive.Think about what effect this would have.

Today's 3D printers come in many varieties, but a common one uses a laser to transform liquid polymers or powders into hard plastics of any shape.Just feed it a 3D object file, such as a CAD image or a screenshot of a character from a video game, and the laser will trace it into shape.Layer by layer, a perfect plastic model will eventually appear before your eyes, just like magic. Solidscape 3D printers can turn bytes into atoms right in your home.It is the ultimate production tool in the long tail world. As 3D printing expands beyond flimsy plastics to metals, synthetic fibers, and a variety of other materials, we may be able to produce parts, toys, or even entire machines ourselves by downloading graphics files from some virtual retailer.For digital products, we already have this capability: Today, you can ask Amazon to mail you a tax software within 10 days, or you can simply download it and run it immediately.Music services offer a similar choice: a CD that arrives next week or a digital song that you can download immediately.But someday in the future, that magic may extend to tangible products as well.Today you can print your own photos at home, tomorrow you might be able to print out an entire picture frame.

We've seen hints of it.Legendary video game designer Will Wright is putting the finishing touches on his next game, Spore.In this game, you can breed your own creature, imbuing it with nature and characteristics of your own design.If you like your work, you can upload it to Spore's server.Then, for around $20, it's printed as a true 3D movable model — complete with colors, textures, and more.Each model is unique and will be delivered to your door within a week or two.You can totally imagine this system as the long tail of commoditization, an exciting harbinger of the world to come.

Like anything else, the long tail of tomorrow will be aggregated, stored efficiently in bytes, and delivered to your home via fiber optics.They will not materialize until the point of consumption, returning to atomic form.It sounds like science fiction, but carrying a massive music library in your pocket sounded like science fiction just 10 short years ago. In the world of entertainment and information, we have moved away from the capacity constraints of shelves and channels, and the uniformity of them.Before long, we too will escape the capacity constraints of mass production.The explosion of varieties triggered by the magical efficiency of digitization will also expand to every other corner of life.The question for tomorrow is not whether more choice is better, but what we really want.In the infinite space, everything is possible.