“Moore’s Not Enough: 4 New Laws of Computing: Moore’s and Metcalfe’s Conjectures Are Taught in Classrooms Every Day—These Four Deserve Consideration, Too”, 2022-02-04 (; backlinks; similar):
…I contend, moreover, that there are still other regularities in the field of computing that could also be formulated in a fashion similar to that of Moore’s and Metcalfe’s relationships. I would like to propose 4 such laws.
Law 1: Yule’s Law of Complementarity
I named this law after George Udny Yule (1912112ya), who was the statistician who proposed the seminal equation for explaining the relationship between 2 attributes. I formulate this law as follows:
If 2 attributes or products are complements, the value/demand of one of the complements will be inversely related to the price of the other complement.
In other words, if the price of one complement is reduced, the demand for the other will increase. There are a few historical examples of this law. One of the famous ones is the marketing of razor blades. The legendary King Camp Gillette gained market domination by applying this rule. He reduced the price of the razors, and the demand for razor blades increased. The history of IT contains numerous examples of this phenomenon, too.
The case of Atari 2600 is one notable example. Atari video games consisted of the console system hardware and the read-only memory cartridges that contained a game’s software. When the product was released, Atari Inc marketed 3 products, namely the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) hardware and the 2 games that it had created, the arcade shooter game Jet Fighter and Tank, a heavy-artillery combat title involving, not surprisingly, tanks.
Crucially, Atari engineers decided that they would use a microchip for the VCS instead of a custom chip. They also made sure that any programmer hoping to create a new game for the VCS would be able to access and use all the inner workings of the system’s hardware. And that was exactly what happened. In other words, the designers reduced the barriers and the cost necessary for other players to develop VCS game cartridges. More than 200 such games have since been developed for the VCS—helping to spawn the sprawling US $170 billion global video game industry today.
A similar law of complementarity exists with computer printers. The more affordable the price of a printer is kept, the higher the demand for that printer’s ink cartridges. Managing complementary components well was also crucial to Apple’s winning the MP3 player wars of the early 2000s, with its now-iconic iPod.
From a strategic point of view, technology firms ultimately need to know which complementary element of their product to sell at a low price—and which complement to sell at a higher price. And, as the economist Bharat Anand points out in his celebrated 2016 book The Content Trap, proprietary complements tend to be more profitable than non-proprietary ones.
[I have been unable to find where George Udny Yule wrote about complementary goods or where the Yule-Simon distribution has been applied to demonstrate ‘commoditize your complement’ dynamics as described by Adenekan Dedeke above.]