An example (somewhat) from the business world: integrated vs modular.
For example, Apple (ios) is integrated and they have complete freedom to design their hardware and software stack from the ground up. This allows them full expressiveness.
In contrast, Google (android) is modular, and they integrate/source components from commodity vendors. It's less expressive, perhaps a degraded experience compared to apple, but much more modular.
The interesting bit is that the traditional wisdom in business is "in the end modular approaches to technology always defeat integrated approaches", although how this will play out in Apple's case is hard to predict, because I suppose Apple is kind of special.
However if we apply the traditional business wisdom to the software domain here, I wonder the same holds: that the expressive/integrated approach is more powerful initially (where may the modular woudln't be able to get "off the ground"), but over time it looses ground to the constrained/modular approach as the modular benefits are allowed to scale to their full potential.
