David Hornik: The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance — don’t do one thing, do it all; don’t sell one piece of content, sell it all; don’t store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn’t work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.
The same businesses that are the poster children for the Long Tail, are the poster children for the Economy of Abundance. And the same businesses that are the victims of the Long Tail are the poster children for the Economy of Scarcity. With bandwidth and storage approaching free, iTunes can offer three million songs (P2P offers nine million). In contrast, with limited shelf space, Tower Records can only offer fifty- or sixty-thousand tracks. The end result, consumer choose abundance over scarcity (something for everyone) — Tower Records gets liquidated while iTunes grows dramatically. Television is undergoing a similar transformation, from scarcity to abundance. TV initially consisted of only the major networks. Consumers were limited to 3 choices in any given time slot. With cable the number of channels was dramatically increased and a broader range of content became available (Food Channel, Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN, etc.). To many, 250 channels may constitute sufficient abundance as to approach infinite choice in their minds. But the true television of abundance is YouTube. With unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, television is subject to microprogramming — millions of shows, viewable on demand at any time. Now not only should NBC be worried, so too should be Comcast.
