[ham_sandwich]

Yes, that’s one way of putting it. In general, by ‘deeper’, I mean it’s more abstracted away from the final customer, that it is ‘further away’ from them.

For example, if you sell toasters, you better hope that electricity has been commoditized in the value chain that you operate in.

Another corollary is that you should commoditize ‘deeper’ complements when you need to defend existing money-makers when they’re at risk of bottom-up disruption. Mobile could have seriously hurt Google’s ad business, so it was a smart defensive play to commoditize mobile os on their terms via Android. To see what happens otherwise, note that they pay Apple $12B annually to have google as safari’s search default.

[stcredzero]

I mean it’s more abstracted away from the final customer, that it is ‘further away’ from them.

What I'm getting from this is: 1) in the causal chain of competitor's profits 2) better camouflaged from the POV of your customers.