Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point comes under fire

Lately it's been open season on popular buzzword business books. First, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail went through the wringer as academics ripped holes in his theory that the real future growth in e-commerce sales lay in scarcely trafficked but easy to stock items. Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, got an equally nasty reception for his latest book, Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. In that book, Anderson explained how many things that are currently sold will soon be given away for free as part of new business models.

New Yorker writer and popular thinker Malcolm Gladwell savaged Anderson and his new economics of digital abundance as totally baseless. Now it's Gladwell's turn to take the hit -- from a more academically rigorous critic, no less.