Isn’t that how electricity works? You purchase electricity directly from the producer, and buy additional plugins (literally) that work with the single source of electricity you’re purchasing.
And we're back to Prompt Engineers :)
Edison used lots of different companies for their own business cases and I think the Edison Illuminating Company only built electric generators. So indeed in the beginning of electricity, when the field was most untested/starting up, you did shop at special companies for a generator or lamps or whatever instead of using an integrated whole-in-one solution of a mega corp! Wikipedia:
> Edison Lamp Company, a lamp manufacturer in East Newark, New Jersey; Edison Machine Works, a manufacturer of dynamos and large electric motors in Schenectady, New York; Bergmann & Company, a manufacturer of electric lighting fixtures, sockets, and other electric lighting devices; and Edison Electric Light Company, the patent-holding company and financial arm for Edison's lighting experiments
These were only later consolidated into General Electric.
Two thoughts:
First, GPT is all marginal cost, no fixed cost. So the marginal economics of 1 super app vs 10 specialized mini apps is roughly the same.
Second, imagine the same argument applied to a utility like electricity. "Why would any company pay for lightbulbs from one company, HVAC from a second company, and appliances from a third company?"
Early on, electricity was complicated and you might actually purchase all of these from the Edison Illuminating Company. But there are returns to specialization, and today the winning formula is different companies that specialize in each. The company best at manufacturing lightbulbs is not necessarily the company that is best at manufacturing washing machines.
Similarly, you could ask: "Why would any company pay for a laptop from one company, an operating system from a second company, and office apps from a third company?"
In some cases it may make sense to vertically integrate (e.g., Apple is happy to sell you a combined laptop + OS + Pages/Numbers), but in many cases the specialized players still do fine (e.g., you might buy a Dell laptop, a Microsoft OS, and Notion/Sheets).