Long Tail Gets Stepped On

Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal takes his shot at Chris Anderson's Long Tail thesis and then Chris deals with the backlash. Whereas Tim Wu's critique on Slate confirmed the existence of the tail, but questioned is universal applicability, Gomes isn't sure that even where the long tail does exist, it's that big a deal.  Gomes questions whether "hits are starting to rule less" and whether the role of the tail is "getting bigger and bigger."
My view is that Chris has a very interesting thesis, at a level similar to Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Surowieki's The Wisdom of Crowds, or Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice.  And I am enjoying the book.  But can one change their strategy to leverage the tail?  By luck or by design, the easy long tail business are spoken for.  And no one tries to manufacture something specifically to sell it in the tail.  It takes too long and, well, you'd always like to have a hit.  And even if you have a long tail business already, like the Alacra Store, adding more content (inventory) and improving discoverability (SEO, marketing) are the common sense tactics to generate more revenue.  So Chris has made a wonderful observation, backed it up with some reasonable good research and is an excellent writer.  All the makings of a hit. 
[The chart shows the distribution of Company Snapshot pages requested on the Alacra Store.  In the head are popular, high cap companies and companies for that score high in terms of SEO; in the tail are all other companies.  The top 1000 companies requested only account for 17% of the company snapshot page views.  So we have a pretty long tail.]