CONCEPT
Overserving
The mechanism by which incumbents create the conditions for their own displacement: improving products along dimensions existing customers reward, eventually exceeding what the majority of the market requires, and opening space for simpler, cheaper alternatives to enter from below.
Overserving is not a mistake. It is the predictable outcome of good management responding rationally to customer feedback and competitive pressure. Incumbents overserve because their best customers ask for more features, more performance, more capability — and the incumbent delivers, because those are the dimensions the market measures and rewards. Each improvement is justified by a specific customer request. Each addition serves a specific use case. But the cumulative effect is a product that exceeds the requirements of the majority of the potential market by an ever-widening margin, creating ever-larger space for a disruptor to enter with a simpler, cheaper, more focused alternative. Applied to AI and the SaaSpocalypse, overserving explains the structural collapse of enterprise software valuations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Usage data across the SaaS industry tells a consistent story: the median user of an enterprise platform uses between five and fifteen percent of available features. She navigates around the unused features, develops workarounds