Andy Warhol put it best. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too,” he declared in 1975. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

That is true not just for Coca-Cola or, for that matter, Campbell’s soup or Brillo pads. One could say much the same about a Hollywood movie, Gmail, Ikea bookshelves, Microsoft Office, the iPhone, the Uber app, a Big Mac, a Moderna vaccine shot and YouTube.

If Warhol were still here to opine, he might object that you can splash out on a private movie screening or pay for a premium subscription to YouTube. True enough. But the broad principle applies: in the unlovely jargon of Silicon Valley, these products and services all “scale”.