You just cannot avoid hearing from, about or quoting @pmarca these days. And if you do manage to avoid him in favour of another quotee, the quotee turns out to be someone else from A18Z. Till 2013, I used to find myself reading @benedictevans a lot and I could claim to be sourcing insight and wisdom from outside this magic circle. But in Jan 2014, A18Z hired Ben. One of the quotes repeated recently by @pmarca and by @benedictevans is “You can make money from software in two ways – bundling and unbundling.”

This is attributed to Jim Barksdale, a throwaway uttered during the run up to the Netscape IPO as they faced a last question from a London investment banker on the danger of Microsoft bundling a competing product into its offering. Justin Fox at HBR thought this was an intriguing enough titbit that he tracked down Jim and @pmarca on this and wrote an HBR article on the conversation that followed.

Unbundling is one of the mechanisms that creates the disruptive innovations identified by Christensen. Once unbundling has happened, the resulting solutions and products need to specialize and evolve to serve the particular needs of their niches of users in specific ways.

What got me thinking about this was how many ways there are of boiling water in a typical house. More intriguingly, a large part of the kitchen countertop and floor area seems to be devoted to appliances whose SINGLE function is to boil water. Let’s start at the biggest one. The biggest single appliance in a house is the boiler which provides hot water in the faucets for bathing and washing and in the radiator for heating.

In my days spent in a Well Known Institute of Technology in North India (WITNI), hot water was a luxury available for one short hour in winter evenings. This hour was often taken up by infinitely more important events like egg-catching (yes, raw) competitions between the brightest minds in the country, and so the supply of heating water had to be generated ad hoc using the very directly named heating rod.

The boiler is convenient and safe, but sometimes you want speed, i.e. water boiled immediately to 100° C, like when you are making tea. You can boil it on the electric stove but this takes ages. We actually rented a flat for a long time that had an electric stove and you just cannot get a decent roti made on an electric stove. When we finally moved to a place with a gas stove, one of our greatest joys was that of rediscovering the phulka. A side benefit was that gas stoves seem to boil water faster.

But that speed is not enough in the morning when you need the cup to get you awake in the first place and don’t have 10 minutes to stare spare. Enter the electric kettle.

With all this paraphernalia, we were settled in family routine with one kid before we decided to have the second one after a gap of about 5 years. And she brought a whole new (rather old and forgotten) set of  needs. On day 1, we needed a bottle steriliser, which is essentially a way to boil water and force it through to every surface in a large number of bottles, teats, caps and other vessels safely, frequently and quickly with the minimum overhead.

As she reached weaning age, we got a steamer for peas, corn and other foods she could start to try. While this is specialised, it is actually remarkably similar to a steriliser in the actual implementation of the functionality. I thought about proposing that we use the steriliser for steaming in the 2 days that it took the steamer to arrive, but I realised that some of the foods would leave the steriliser needing frequent washes and I elected to keep the idea to myself.

I was about to press “Publish”, when it occurred to me that I had not ironed my shirts for tomorrow. And a steam press really gets the wrinkles out.

As I finished ironing, my wife called out to me from the dining room, “I have set the table for dinner. The rice is ready in the microwave. Please get it on the way to the table.” And all that it takes to cook rice is to boil it in water. We used to cook rice on the stove in a pressure cooker, but if you make the slightest delay in turning the stove off after the whistle, you end up with a porridge instead of rice and if you don’t wait for the whistle, you get raw, rough rice. The microwave is completely predictable and perfect.

However, it does require you to wait 22 – 25 minutes depending on how you like the rice, so some folks take specialisation to its extreme in the faster rice cooker, which also does a good job of keeping the rice warm.

After we had eaten, it was time to send the kids off to bed. For some reason, possibly pollen and pollution, we all find ourselves with congested noses all the time. So we purchased some humidifiers to keep the rooms humid in the night. Their sole point is to boil water, but additionally cool the resulting steam in a tower so it couldn’t possibly burn, say, an inquisitive child.

What it boils down to is this, there is more than one way to boil water, and that’s better than skinning a cat.

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