Conventional wisdom says you should do one thing and do it really well. Customers however, can only bear so many different tools before the fragmentation makes it harder to solve their problem.
An infinite butler would do everything really well, instantly available at one’s beck and call. Imagine a platform for running your business that just did everything from start to finish. Sounds great but it doesn’t exist. Why?
There’s a fundamental tension between the number of problems solved and the quality of the product. If the number of problems your product promises to solve outweighs the capacity to sufficiently solve them, you have a crappy infinite butler.
(I paraphrased this idea from a conversation I had with Jeff Weinstein who is just a fountain of wisdom for building products and startups)
See also:
- A crappy infinite butler can still win when worse is better
- Design is how it works and the complexity of solving an overly broad set of problems directly will mire design
- Another explanation for why we don’t see more attempts at an infinite butler is that it’s in opposition to having good taste