New this week
A quick recap of the PH daily from this week
- Down with portals?
- Influence in and out of ecosystems
- Jill Rowley on moving from MQL to EQL
- How to prevent zombie partners
- Extending the gears of your org
Orienting to the age of rebundling
Innovation is a series of bundlings and unbundlings.
The SaaS revolution unbundled tooling for companies. They could hand-craft a stack of stand-alone solutions, instead of being beholden to a single massive provider on a long-term contract.
D2C unbundled retail. It allowed consumers to hand-craft their own product 'stack' based on individual brands they trust, instead of trusting a few large stores to choose all the product lines.
YouTube unbundled production companies with the long tail.
You get the idea.
What's behind all these unbundlings? Well ultimately, it's about supply and demand.
Info costs are a major part of every transaction. Pre-internet, it was too hard for businesses and consumers to go research every product choice. They outsourced it to a few large vendors. The supply of info was pretty low, and those who owned it were the main distributors of product.
The internet caused a massive plunge in the cost of producing and sharing information. That meant a surge in supply to meet pent-up demand. Everyone could do their own research, find niche products and services never before possible, and disaggregate many parts of the market. Millions of products bloomed - especially in the world of software.
But nothing is ever static in an economy, because humans aren't static.
Near-zero info cost led to unbundling first, but now the pendulum swinging back in many areas.
When the cost of info is ultra-low the supply gets so high it overwhelms. The infocalypse looms.
Consumers and businesses want the choice and customization of the internet age. They want the modular and diverse product stack, but they also want to outsource curation of that stack. They don't want to have to wade through everything. Picking between 1000's of vendors is too much.
Enter the rebundling.
But the new bundle isn't built around businesses as much as communities and ecosystems.
Buyers look to communities, influencers in those communities, and broader networks within which those communities operate. They want someone to trust.
They want fewer decisions. Fewer things they need to become expert in. They want a few close trusted choosers - and choosing those choosers is where they exercise their freedom - to reduce the number of choices.
We’re in a rebundling phase. And what bundles you make it into and which choosers tell their communities to choose you probably matter more than direct sales or marketing.
Bundled with love just for you
We try to put together a nice little stack of info relevant to the emerging age of ecosystems every day in these emails. Feel free to send along suggestions!
