There is no shortage of information products. And there is no shortage of information products on information products
The best part is that the products proliferate and expand into smaller and smaller niches.
These ever more specialized tools are designed to solve smaller and smaller specialized problems. There is no theoretical limit, it can be infinitely small. The only practical limit is whether there is enough of a market to support the product financially. Ironically, more information products are needed to cover all these specialized tools more accurately…
Sometimes, these specialized applications are designed for specially trained professionals. And at other times, they are designed to make advanced skills and capabilities available to regular users. (This is a potential application area for really specialized artificial intelligence.)
In either case, more apps and specialists are needed to integrate these tools. Maybe the integrations are baked directly into the product, or maybe you need to work with an application programming interface to connect the products. However it is done, more work is needed to connect the applications and keep them working.
But the fun doesn’t stop there, you can add on even more integrations with even more products.
Maybe you get to integration nirvana where things just work, or maybe you spend most of your time fixing problems every time an upgrade is released for one of the applications.
I like to think that there is an integration nirvana, but integration by its nature is reactive. New things emerge that need to be connected and the cycle continues.
The creation of the perfectly integrated system would practically necessitate that you stop making any changes to the system. This would essentially stop innovation and progress and leave the system vulnerable to nimbler competitors that are able to change more quickly.
The current information paradigm works by dividing and then connecting. It gets bigger by getting smaller, it gets slower by becomimg more agile and the system gets more fragile as it connects more pieces.
The paradoxes and ambiguities of the information age.
