Specialists Become Specialty Aggregators

“that education is being unbundled into its component parts: content, teachers, credentials, community, physical campus, mentors, hiring and network.”

Hasn’t Google become more like AOL in some senses? Plus, hangouts, docs, email, etc. 

It seems inevitable for the niche gorilla to continue to add new products and more niches, becoming an aggregator like the one they might have initially displaced. 

Interesting that Twitter has not taken that approach. Facebook has. LinkedIn has, though perhaps more naturally and narrower than Google. Stack has (hi joel), in very natural and sensible ways.

And Andy asked…

The tendency is toward revenue growth, which leads to adding products or features that drive revenue toward the core model. If Twitter were public, the public market demand for revenue growth would likely lead it to “portalize” or add services (say image storage, archiving, analytics, front end tools, etc)

With Google, it makes sense for them to capture more web traffic to drive its revenue engine; that explains Android, the wifi investments, Plus, etc. Search is–as big as it is–a finite market (number of people x avg number of searches). 

Note Google hasn’t added other revenue models in any significant way; at its core its a lead-gen engine and needs to feed it in any way possible.

That’s the armchair view, anyway. EDIT: I guess that’s a way of saying that fragmentation is not a final state of any market; there’s a natural ebb and flow from specializing to generalizing, and a new crop of specialists disrupting the new generalists.