---
title: "Bundling and reach"
description: "Economies of scope: selling the next product to the same customer base at almost no cost. A bundle presses on single-product companies with arithmetic — their product competes with \"included in what you already pay for\". Hence Jim Barksdale's famous line that there are only two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling."
canonical: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/27/
locale: en
---

# Bundling and reach

> Markdown twin of https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/27/ — the same content as the HTML page, a fraction of the bytes.
> Every page of this site has one: append `.md` to any URL, or `index.md` to a directory URL.
> Site structure and the full page list for agents: https://moa.giglabo.com/llms.txt

- Sheet 27 / 35

## Passport

- **Rock**: Mathematics
- **Depth**: 2 · Excavator
- **Time to dig**: 1–3 years
- **Capital**: ◐ · medium
- **Solo**: ~ partly
- **AI**: → eroding
- **Rent**: ✗ not for sale

## Essence

Economies of scope: selling the next product to the same customer base at almost no cost. A bundle presses on single-product companies with arithmetic — their product competes with "included in what you already pay for". Hence Jim Barksdale's famous line that there are only two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling.

## How it is built

### Microsoft 365 — the bundle as a weapon of mass destruction

Word, Excel, Teams, OneDrive, Defender: every new product enters a subscription the company already pays for — zero customer acquisition cost, instant distribution. The story of Teams against Slack is one case of the general mechanism: a single-product vendor is not fighting a product, it is fighting "free, in the package".

### Amazon Prime — the bundle as retention glue

Delivery plus video plus music plus photos: each component is middling on its own, but the combination makes cancelling irrational — something in the set is always needed. Here the bundle works not to sell something new but to zero out churn across everything.

### Adobe Creative Cloud — from boxes to a subscription bundle

The move from selling separate boxes to one subscription to everything: a designer who needs only Photoshop is sold twenty applications, and the combined price makes focused competitors look expensive next to the zero marginal price of one more tool inside CC.

## How it is bypassed

### Unbundling with best-in-class

The average module of a bundle is vulnerable to a focused single-product company: Figma killed Adobe's bundled design tool XD so thoroughly that Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20 billion, and Slack opened up Skype for Business the same way. The classic map of attack is Craigslist, taken apart into dozens of companies — Airbnb, Zillow, Indeed — each of which took one section and made it ten times better. The attacker picks the module where the pain is highest and the bundle's quality lowest.

### Regulatory unbundling

The giants' bundles are a permanent antitrust target, from the Microsoft case over Internet Explorer to the unbundling of Teams from Office after Slack's EU complaint. The attacker files complaints not instead of building a product but alongside it: the legal track softens the bundle, the product track takes what comes loose.

### Rebundling around a new axis

What is unbundled gets reassembled — by someone else and around a different centre: streaming took cable apart and is now stitching itself into packages; the indie world assembled Setapp, a subscription bundle of independent Mac apps, as a collective answer by small players to the economics of giants. The attacker need not fight somebody else's bundle; it can build its own on a new axis of aggregation.

## Verdict

A bundle is a moat made of zero acquisition cost on your own base. It is bypassed by focused superiority in one module, by antitrust, and by assembling a new bundle around a new axis.

## Related

- HTML version of this page: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/27/
- Русский: https://moa.giglabo.com/ru/moats/27/
- Previous: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/26/
- Next: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/28/
- Atlas: https://moa.giglabo.com/
- Catalogue: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/
- Calculator: https://moa.giglabo.com/calculator/
- Site map for agents: https://moa.giglabo.com/llms.txt