Linking Product Design to Human Wants

I'm getting the feeling you can make a tool into a product, but you can't successfully design a product to become a tool. The idea that you can make something powerful and sophisticated and people will pay for it before it realizes their existing tool workflow, suffers from the basic counterfactual of, "if only people did things this slightly different way, my tool/product would solve everything!"

A tool must enhance an existing activity or workflow, whereas a "solution," must take on the risk of it failing. A product is a tool or solution with features that people pay for. Even great visionary design shops built incremental iterations on existing needs, and the revolutionary aspect they become known for was a further downstream effect of their refinement that unblocked growth. In this sense, I'd speculate that Apple doesn't invent very much, and in fact few companies and people who actually invent things do very well at all, but the ones who refine existing things are the ones that grow. I wonder how generally true that is.

Nice theories, but they seem blind to the question: if a product is only a marginal improvement over the previous version, then is it still desirable given all the negative externalities? Should we be stimulating overconsumption if it makes people only marginally happier for a very short time?