perhaps others will weigh in on this, but...

...geographic concerns are not what "the long tail" means,
as far as i know...

-bowerbird

The Long Tail strategy asserts that the many items that sell in low volume can be larger in aggregate than the few blockbusters, if you can stock and fulfill them profitably, and I think the concept does apply here. In this case, it's the geographic markets (which we could never serve profitably in print) that Apple has aggregated for us that are the low-volume sales.

i still don't think that expanding your market-reach
for your full existing product-line is the same thing as
comparing "long-tail" items to the "head" items, but
i suppose chris anderson is too busy to referee, and
i agree that it's nice that apple does the dirt-work of
collecting money from all of those different countries.

makes it worth the 30% cut they take, i'd say...

-bowerbird

The long tail is only a theory and one should be able to adapt the theory to his or her needs. I agree with Andrew - instead of using products as the item list, using geographical regions is just the same as you expand on a limited focus set to a much wider scope.

i should have been able to see this thread would go nowhere.

-bowerbird