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Great follow on to the thinking in his book The Long Tail on Chris Anderson‘s blog in a post called “More on the Economics of Abundance”.

It’s a good reminder that a good way to get an edge today in business, communications and media is to be thinking about what all of the revolutionary changes to our world really mean. He focuses on the amazing potential of ideas if we just let ourselves think “what if X was available in such abundance it was almost free”:

Abundance thinking–understanding the implications of “practically free”–is a core competence of our age. It brought us everything from the iPod (“what if storage were so cheap you could put your entire music collection in your pocket?”) to Gmail (“why should you ever have to delete an email?”). Most truly disruptive technologies disrupt because they take a scarcity assumption and, thanks to some technology that generates abundances, simply turn it on its head. Just think VOIP (why should phone calls, which use hardly any bandwidth, cost anything?) or how anyone under 25 uses a digital camera (why settle for stills when you’d rather have the video?)