[cmuguythrow]

How does this idea merge with the idea of "unbundling"? For example, I think of Craigslist, and its famous "unbundling" story[1]. For Aibnb, fiverr, Getaround, etc., the individual niches were enough to build a big product off of, and there was no need (or maybe no ability?) to grow that product back into the "everything for everyone" of Craiglist. What is different about SAP/JIRA/Salesforce? Why can't "not bad" niche-focused subsets of these products become big and profitable while still focusing on their initial niche/area?

[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/craigslist-unbundling/

[jacobr1]

Cross-functional workflows within enterprises. Developers can have their own nice, but what about working with tech-writers, oh now we need to have approval processes for third-party systems and idea-gathering from customers for pms, and integration with internal case-management for Customer support escalations and some acquisition uses a different methodology so now we merge on a single platform that contains slight variants or what really are the same states for status. And marketing needs support for the product launches, and we now integrating security scanning tools automatically filing bugs ... oh security has new process steps because we all are doing DevSecOps. And for this special process we need 3 layers of managerial approval. First it was email based, then Slack, then MS-Teams, then back to Slack. And the Old-school QA team for the hardware component has different metadata requirements and internal IT-bug tracking has different requirements than the product-engineering group. And now we want to track cloud spend so every ticket has to have a cost estimate.

The requirements change, merge, flow. In theory each department within the enterprise could have their own optimized, silo'd tool ... but then you need "enterprise integration platforms" to glue together all the workflows between them.

[erybodyknows]

Likely because of B2B vs B2C. Individual users can easily switch when a better solution appears on the market. Business use cases tend to involve a little more friction in those decisions.

[pbourke]

If you think about it, all of those niches were naturally unbundled. The people who were looking for vacation rentals had no need to also look for gig work within the same product. The same isn’t true of enterprise transactions - everything is always related, with cross-function impact. There is always a GL that needs to be updated, you need a common vendor list, budget allocation constrains procurement, and on and on.