A product made by one company will be a Gilded Turd.

In the limit, each feature must be designed to fit coherently with all other ones.

That is a combinatorial cost with the size of the functionality.

Each feature you want to add gets increasingly more expensive to rationalize into the existing ones.

There's a single bottleneck of the entity needing to appear coherent.

Compare that to a swarm building on top of a backbone substrate: a platform.

The swarm doesn't care about looking coherent globally; it just builds what is useful locally that makes sense.

This process can add functionality in proportion to heat of the ecosystem and doesn't have a bottleneck that increases cost.

A Grubby Truffle.

Superficially ugly, deeply beautiful.