There is a philosophy that businesses/apps/programs should “Do 1 Thing and Do It Well”, that stems from the Unix Philosphy, which is a suggestion of how to write and design software. While I don’t think it’s necessarily the case for every company/app/program, I do think it’s the case for most. Look at the biggest example of this: Google. Yeah, they offer other services and products, but Google is a search engine. Even thought they kept the name for a lot of it, they did a good job of seperating They even recently split off into a conglomerate call Alphabet to help separate Google from all it’s other services and products. I think Dropbox is another
###What are some sites that go far and beyond the philosophy of “do 1 thing and do it well”?
To the point where it dilutes the reason why they exist in the first place.
One that comes to mind is Imgur. They started out as a quick and easy way to upload pictures to Reddit. They did a really good job of that for years. They developed a lot of their own community features a few years ago, but recently have started pushing it hard and developing ever more annoying features to remind you that they are a community website too.
The vast majority of people using Imgur are using it as an image host. That probably doesn’t make a lot of money, but that’s not the point. If they stop fulfilling the need, then someone else will.
Actually Google is an artificial intelligence company. Their search engine is just somewhere to try out some of the AI ideas. Their autonomous cars are just another aspect of the same thing.
Not all of their AI projects are under that section though - for example Google Search is an AI project of theirs that doesn’t fall under that section of the company. The one thing that ALL Google projects whether under X or not have in common is that they all involve AI in some form.
Youtube suffers this issue associated with Google because of it’s obsession with automation. They will not interact with their own community. But does Youtube do 1 thing well? Not really, it is more of a case of they are the only existence of such and do not as of yet have the competition to gauge against themselves. The monopolization allows them to be a wannabe jack-of-trades but master-of-none. And Twitch doesn’t count.
But only if you have enough time to actually do them all - that’s a problem the two guys who created w3schools suffered from - they could do all of the dozens of topics well if only there were a few hundred hours in each day for the two of them to actually keep all the topics up to date. Due to a lack of time all of the topics are out of date roughly in proportion to how much the topics have changed since they created the site.