The concept of the "long tail" originates from an article by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine in which he described the niche strategy of certain businesses such as Amazon.com or Netflix.

But as has been pointed out by Joe Kraus, the long tail doesn’t just apply to music and movies.  It applies to software as well:

The purpose of software in business is to support the way a business does business – from the way a business runs it’s hiring and firing to the way it orders materials to the way it tracks sales. In the market-speak that surrounds the technology business, the purpose of software in business is to support these “business processes”.

Let’s do some simple math. First, every business has multiple processes. Things like hiring, firing, selling, ordering, etc. Second, while some of these are pretty common in name from business to business (recruiting, for example), in practice, they are usually highly customized. Finally, there are simply a large number of processes that are either unique or that are common to millions of very small markets and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to buy software for (for example, the process by which an architecture firm communicates between it’s clients and the city planning office).

These three facts

• every business has multiple processes
• processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
• there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.

means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.

Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve....

In the past, software’s long tail has been generally inaccessible because software has been

• Too difficult to write
• Too expensive to write and distribute
• Too brittle or expensive to customize once deployed.

It just hasn’t been economical for someone to create a custom software company to help architecture firms.

That’s why, in the software business, the traditional focus has been on dozens of markets of millions instead of millions of markets of dozens. The traditional software model is to make software have enough features and address enough of a homogeneous market that you can sell millions of copies of the same software. In the past, that’s been the only way to make money.'

With the advent of platforms like Quickbase, it becomes possible for business users closest to the problems being solved to quickly build full-featured collaborative business applications online and immediately deploy those applications to the appropriate people in their organization. These platforms significantly reduce the need to hire professional software developers, requisition (and wait for) a new software purchase or development project from IT, or kludge together a solution using tools like spreadsheets and email. 

Now, software solutions can affordably be created, for example, for a small group of users with specific needs or for applications that have a short life span. Examples of typical long tail applications include a simple map-based dealer locator gadget for a manufacturer, a department budget forecast application for an organization, and a comparative vendor quotation management system.  But these same tools can also be used to create complete, comprehensive systems for the entire organization.