I'm getting the feeling you can make a tool into a product, but you can't successfully design a product to become a tool. The idea that you can make something powerful and sophisticated and people will pay for it before it realizes their existing tool workflow, suffers from the basic counterfactual of, "if only people did things this slightly different way, my tool/product would solve everything!"
A tool must enhance an existing activity or workflow, whereas a "solution," must take on the risk of it failing. A product is a tool or solution with features that people pay for.
Even great visionary design shops built incremental iterations on existing needs, and the revolutionary aspect they become known for was a further downstream effect of their refinement that unblocked growth. In this sense, I'd speculate that Apple doesn't invent very much, and in fact few companies and people who actually invent things do very well at all, but the ones who refine existing things are the ones that grow. I wonder how generally true that is.
A quote that seems related to that thought:
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." —John Gall
Yes this concept explains it succinctly but I’m having trouble following the parent comment. Is it said that a product is a tool or solution that people pay for and you cannot design it like you can a tool that people don’t pay for? Of course you can. In many ways this is the difference between open source and SaaS.
Nice theories, but they seem blind to the question: if a product is only a marginal improvement over the previous version, then is it still desirable given all the negative externalities? Should we be stimulating overconsumption if it makes people only marginally happier for a very short time?
A tool must enhance an existing activity or workflow, whereas a "solution," must take on the risk of it failing. A product is a tool or solution with features that people pay for. Even great visionary design shops built incremental iterations on existing needs, and the revolutionary aspect they become known for was a further downstream effect of their refinement that unblocked growth. In this sense, I'd speculate that Apple doesn't invent very much, and in fact few companies and people who actually invent things do very well at all, but the ones who refine existing things are the ones that grow. I wonder how generally true that is.