CONCEPT
Death of the Average Product
The economic consequence of zero-cost creation: the general-purpose tool designed for everyone and perfect for no one becomes obsolete when each customer can build exactly what her specific context requires.
The average product is the product that market research optimizes for — the median preference, the most common use case, the feature set that satisfies the largest number of customers at an acceptable level without delighting any of them. The general-purpose CRM. The all-in-one project management tool. For two centuries, industrial production favored the average product because customization cost exceeded compromise cost. The language interface inverts that economics. When building a tool for a single person costs the price of a conversation, the economics of customization invert, the customer stops compromising, and the average product — which was always a compromise — has no economic reason to exist.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The death is visible in the bimodal market structure that the Software Death Cross produced. The thick platforms serving complex multi-stakeholder needs retain pricing power. The infinite tail of personal software serves specific individual needs. The middle — the average products serving average markets