Every new technology wave reintroduces the concept of "super apps" as a solution to all the opportunities of the new foundational technology. Why don't we use one today?

Ironically it is tech enthusiasts love these all-in-one apps (the way they love convertible devices) so they build them. It is a tech answer to "assembling your app from parts". Tech enthusiasts also love parts and assembling apps.

But normal people find these apps overwhelming. They also find "assembling" impossibly complex. Instead the larger market gravitates towards app categories where they understand them. Anyone with a banking app knows how irritating the "super" part of that app is as they constantly push more stuff into it squeezing out anything you might need to use (Bank of America anyone.) How often do I spontaneously need a loan or new credit card when I launch the app on my phone?

We can see this in every mobile service category where the category continues to thrive even in the face of bundled super apps (like Expedia, Uber, etc.)

It is partially the bundle<>unbundle cycle but also a tension between users who genuinely enjoy the process of assembling the perfect combination of parts into a perfect bundle product. The problem is that isn't most or even a lot of people relative to markets.

This makes growth very difficult for category leaders.

There was a history in ancient MS-DOS where leading companies (and programmers) aimed to build "all in one" apps to compete with the entrenched category leaders. Then the category leaders did their take on all-in-one as a defensive strategy. Neither of those existed.

Then with Windows as category products rose there was immense pressure to build "all-in-one" and to "unify". We actually resisted this internally.

Then the web came along and once there were browsers the view was "what tools can we build into a browser." There were categories of tools like news, mail, ftp, etc. and quickly browsers (MS and Netscape) added those. Many believed that is what caused the hiccup for the Navigator product. The problem primarily was that the web was busy reinventing these categories so the old apps no longer existed as apps, but as web pages. It took a long time but it was happening.

Then came the push to componentize apps once that failed. That rode the Java wave. Suddenly all apps would be made out of assembling small Java Applets. The first target for this was to unbundle Office and make your own domain specific word processor or spreadsheet. This time it would happen in enterprise because the developers were there.

Turned out bundling parts into tools was equally difficult for enterprise. Instead they put web front ends on those tools. Then those tools got reinvented on the backend and gave rise to Salesforce, Workday, etc. No one assembled anything. Data export continued as it always did and API connections got a new model making communication easier but few categories got replaced. Expense reporting is a good example of this where innovation continues as category tools.

Here's an old story on components and Office and the debate that took place that had us under the gun as the web took hold. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/049-go-get-this-rock