Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Software vendors in many markets — not just those in Eclipse's first beachhead of application development and life-cycle tools — should look at Eclipse through the lens of the Long Tail economic model to understand if and how the platform can transform their markets in the way that it has already done for application development. It has become unfortunately easy to dismiss any mention of the Long Tail as marketing hype — but in the case of Eclipse, the hype should not be allowed to obscure a very powerful insight. The Eclipse Foundation's ambitions for Eclipse extend far beyond its roots in application development, and the Long Tail provides a model for how large, broad-based vendors; smaller, more specialized vendors; and niche plug-in providers can all profit from the kind of economy and ecology that Eclipse can create.

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