This is true of the iPhone and a number of other technical artifacts, and it is underremarked upon.
On the consumer Internet side of things: everyone uses the same Google, functionally the same Gmail, *almost* the same Twitter, the same YouTube, extremely similar data pipes, etc.
On the producer side of the Internet, you don’t immediately run literally the same software as AppAmaGooBookSoft but you could have equivalent capabilities to a Fortune 500 company basically immediately, for a trivial amount of money, very literally running on the same box.
Early career professionals might be confused that this was ever not the case. It did not use to be the case! If you didn’t have $250k++ for an Oracle license you used to have to accept *extremely significant* lack of ability to do things.
And you largely didn’t have *access.*
And you largely didn’t have *access.*
Access used to be negotiated by bizdev/etc teams and was sent-by-default. Open APIs being available is an under appreciated change in the state of the world, both because it means you can likely use them (despite not “meriting” access to a gatekeeper) & because they are levelers.
The technical reality and economics of software development mean that companies with APIs largely don’t want to have to maintain multiple versions of them, so you are highly likely to be on the same one as their 90th percentile accounts, with relatively similar capabilities.
It is frankly amazing that this works to the extent it does. It’s one of the reasons I love working at Stripe: to a first approximation, we aspire to delivering the same set of capabilities to the largest companies in the world and also someone building something on day one.
