The level of customizability of experiences determines where the basis of competition occurs.
In the early days of the web, there were a lot of mash-ups and greasemonkey scripts; competition could happen to some degree at the level of the feature.
Apps are extremely hard to tinker with and compose.
In the last decade, the basis of competition has shifted more and more to the level of the whole product, as a monolith.
The result is a centralization of time and attention in a very small number of very large monoliths.
But there are tons of features that could add a lot of value as a feature, but not enough value to motivate trying to build a whole new monolith.
And the owners of the monolith aren't motivated to do them either.
They need to make a one-size-fits-all thing for their massive user base.
Every bit of complexity (even progressively disclosed complexity) they add makes the app harder to use for their lowest motivation users.
And also, you need to reach a big scale of adoption to make it "worth it".
If you have a billion users, and there's a feature that 1M people would love it's just too small to prioritize.
The result is monoliths tend to optimize for the lowest common denominator.
My friend Ivan riffed on this idea in Tyranny of the Marginal User a few months ago.
Monoliths also mean that users have to trust a small number of experiences to have a huge amount of data on them.
There is a whole set of easy-to-imagine improvements that would add a ton of value for society but are not feasible today.
What if you could atomize experiences into swarms of self-assembling micro-apps?
Each micro-app wouldn't need to know that much individual data on a user to be useful.
Each micro-app wouldn't be that interesting; it would be the emergent fabric of them woven together that would be the value.
That could unleash huge amounts of pent-up innovation.
You'd need some level of general-purpose intelligence to stitch them together that could take an abstract natural language intent and make it concrete for computers to execute...