When firms are pursuing narrow market windows with limited engineering resources, they can easily be tempted to skip the hard work of decomposing systems into clean modules and instead proceed as quickly as possible to a viable solution. Over time, however, this approach makes it much more difficult to mobilize an external ecosystem of developers who can build on top of the core platform and extend its offerings into new markets.18 Thus, a firm that has an integral architecture will likely have to invest in remaking its core technology.
