Kyle Harrison
concept

Commoditizing Complements

Commoditizing Complements

One-line definition: The strategy of driving down the price of whatever is complementary to your own product, so demand for your product rises.

How sources describe it

  • Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V, quoted in AI Is Oil, Not God: “Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.”
  • AI Is Oil, Not God reads the July 2026 open-weights letter as a textbook case: every signatory sells something complementary to open models — chips (Nvidia), software (Microsoft), hosting (Hugging Face), machines (Dell), or applications built on top (Box (Company), ServiceNow, Replit, Perplexity). Cheaper, more plentiful models raise demand for all of it.
  • The same source notes the strategic effect on rivals: more model-layer competition makes it harder for Anthropic and OpenAI to “run away with the frontier and build a duopoly.”

Where it shows up

  • AI Is Oil, Not God — the open-weights letter read as commoditize-your-complements.
  • Open Source — open-sourcing a complement is the most common way this strategy gets executed.
  • Joel Spolsky — source of the canonical formulation.