Welcome to the Andrews and Horowitz podcast. I'm Benedict Heavens. I'm here talking today with Steven Sinovsky about the topic that's lasted the entire history of the competing industry, which is bundling and unbundling. I wrote a blog post on Sunday that started out by quoting, was it Jim Barksdale, who supposedly during the Netscape IPA presentations, told people

that there are only two ways to make money in software bundling and unbundling.

But of course it goes back a lot longer than that.

And the thing that I was sort of poking away at is that when you look at what's going on in

smartphones today, on the one hand you have this trend towards unbundling features from inside apps and making

stand-lane apps. I think Fred Wilson called this a constellation of apps. And so you have

Facebook pulling stuff out of Facebook, you have four square splitting its app into, you

have lots of other people trying to do single-purpose apps. And the motivation for that is

a limited screen real estate, which changes the discovery dynamic,

and B, that any app is just two taps away.

So it's much easier to switch between different apps.

And so you see WhatsApp and Instagram unbundling Facebook, and you see Facebook unbundling itself.

But you also, fundamentally, I think, see apps unbundling the web, because everything used to be just in that one icon, and now it's pulled out into lots of icons.

And Steve, as you were saying, this is kind of a story that goes back to office and it goes

back to mainframes and everything else.

The whole thing just goes, I mean, you know, in a sense, it's just, it's about innovation.

I mean, you know, you, you, you have an idea to, to complete some

task. It could be a consumer task, a business task, and then you build it. And, and then what you

find is that your idea is sort of, you know, related to other ideas. And so you start to add features.

And then one day you have like someone else's whole vertical integrated

into your product. But it's never as good as the separate one. But it might be good enough

to keep your customers from jumping and using another product. And so you, you, and then one day

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