I've been using AI models for a lot these days as part of my work. They're getting more impressive by the day and are able to demonstrate planning and several aspects of thinking. They continue to have some serious limitations contrary to the hype, but then we all tend to expect a lot from new technologies. One of the limitations is the size of their context windows, similar to the limitations of early PCs in the 90s that had limited random access memory (RAM). I decided to test three different LLMs with a large body of text to see what happens.
I gave them the PDF of the book I wrote in 2018 to see what happens. It seems to be that all three models do go through the entire text but differ in outputs in terms parts they choose to elaborate. The parts that are common across all reviews are of course relate to the ideas and concepts that are spread across the book and can't be missed. Each model also has its own idea of what a book review should look like, which points to the inherent differences in the weights and parameters of the model. This goes to show why the idea of mixture of experts (MoE) is important if you seek consensus and corroboration.
Anyway, below are the three reviews.
Claude Opus 4.1
In an economy where services account for nearly 80% of GDP in developed nations, it's remarkable how poorly we understand them. Majid Iqbal's "Thinking in Services" arrives as an ambitious attempt to remedy this gap, offering nothing less than a unified field theory for service design.
The book's central innovation is the "16x frame" - a structured grid that decomposes any service into 16 fundamental elements, from customer motivations to agent capabilities. Think of it as a periodic table for services, or as Iqbal might prefer, a kind of DNA sequencing for the intangible economy. Each element connects to others through what he calls "promises" - the commitments that customers and providers make to enable performances and affordances.
This framework proves surprisingly powerful when applied to real-world cases. Iqbal walks readers through hospital laundry services, airline operations, grocery stores, and medical imaging, showing how the same structural logic underlies wildly different service contexts. His analysis of how Netherlands-based Alice navigates multiple interconnected services during a simple train journey to Schiphol Airport illuminates the hidden choreography of modern life.
The book's mathematical approach to service value, crystallized in the equation O-P/E=N, elegantly captures why some services succeed while others fail, despite similar offerings. Experience, Iqbal argues convincingly, acts as a "cost coefficient" that can make or break service viability.
The timing of this book proves prescient. Iqbal's emphasis on services as coded, structured systems anticipates current developments in artificial intelligence and automation. His "executable scripts" - narratives generated from completed 16x frames - bear an uncanny resemblance to how large language models process and generate text. The fictional "Sunshine Cab Company" that closes the book, owned and operated entirely by autonomous vehicles, feels less like science fiction than imminent reality.
However, this is not an easy read. Iqbal makes no concessions to casual browsers. The book demands sustained attention and rewards careful study. His writing oscillates between playful (introducing skeptics "Thomas Doubting" and "Jerry Maguire" to interrogate concepts) and densely technical. The progression from 2x stereotypes to 4x frames to the full 16x structure requires readers to build understanding systematically - there are no shortcuts.
Business readers may find the abstraction level frustrating. While Iqbal provides concrete examples, he's more interested in underlying structures than tactical advice. Those seeking immediately applicable insights for service improvement may need to work harder than expected to extract practical value.
Yet this abstraction is the book's strength. By forcing readers to think structurally about familiar experiences, Iqbal reveals fundamental patterns we typically overlook. Most people assume they understand services because they use them daily, but this book demonstrates how much remains hidden beneath surface interactions.
The book's relevance extends beyond service design. Corporate strategists will find value in Iqbal's discussion of "tactical moves" - how companies can navigate the tension between customer and provider net values. Policymakers should note his insights on public services, where legitimacy and public confidence become critical design elements. Technology leaders will recognize parallels between his service patterns and microservices architectures.
"Thinking in Services" joins a select category of business books that introduce genuinely new conceptual frameworks rather than repackaging familiar ideas. Like Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" or W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's "Blue Ocean Strategy," it offers a novel lens for viewing economic activity. Whether Iqbal's framework achieves similar influence will depend on whether practitioners find it worth the considerable effort required to master it.
For organizations serious about service innovation - from traditional companies shifting to service models to governments modernizing public services - this book offers essential insights. It's particularly valuable for those grappling with service complexity at scale. The 16x frame provides a shared language for diverse teams to collaborate on service design, addressing a critical gap in current methodologies.
Iqbal, who developed these methods while advising the Dutch government and working with organizations from Boeing to the U.S. Department of Defense, brings unusual depth to his subject. His framework has been battle-tested in contexts ranging from healthcare to cloud computing.
"Thinking in Services" won't be for everyone. But for those willing to engage with its demanding framework, it offers something rare: a genuinely new way to think about a fundamental aspect of modern economic life. In a world where "everything as a service" has become a mantra, Iqbal provides the grammar we need to speak this new language fluently.
OpenAI GPT-5
Services account for nearly 80% of GDP in developed economies, yet we lack a shared way to describe how they work. Majid Iqbal’s Thinking in Services tries to fix that—less with slogans than with a grammar that lets teams write services down, compare them, and improve them without breaking what already works.
At the center is the 16× frame, a structured grid that decomposes any service into 16 elements—from customer motivations and obligations to provider capabilities, constraints, and protections. Think periodic table, not checklist. Each cell is a declarative statement; together they form a testable narrative of “who promises what to whom, under which conditions, with what capacities and safeguards.” The connective tissue is Iqbal’s concept of promises: explicit commitments that enable performances and affordances on both sides of the exchange.
The method travels well. Iqbal applies the same structure to hospital laundry, airline operations, grocery retail, and medical imaging, showing how shared logic spans very different contexts. A memorable vignette follows a Dutch commuter—Alice—threading multiple services on a simple train trip to Schiphol Airport; the frame reveals the choreography beneath an everyday journey.
Value, in this telling, isn’t a vibe — it’s a calculation. Iqbal’s compact equation N = (O − P) / E explains why look-alike offerings diverge in the market. Experience (E) acts like a cost coefficient: when E > 1.0, price feels lighter; when E < 1.0, price behaves like a penalty. Score both the customer’s N and the provider’s N, and strategy becomes the art of nudging those numbers with small, compounding design moves—policy tweaks, interface changes, better handoffs—rather than episodic overhauls.
The timing feels apt. The book treats services as coded, structured systems, which rhymes with how modern AI parses meaning. Completed 16× frames become “executable” narratives that resemble how large models use embeddings and concept graphs to compose output. The closing case, the fictional Sunshine Cab Company owned and operated by autonomous vehicles, now reads less like a thought experiment and more like an oncoming operating problem: how to maintain promises when no human is at the wheel.
None of this is spoon-fed. The prose toggles between playful (skeptics named Thomas Doubting and Jerry Maguireshow up to pressure-test ideas) and densely technical. Understanding builds stepwise—from 2× stereotypes to 4× framesto the full 16×—and the book expects you to do the work. Some managers will want more tactics; others will appreciate a structure that makes tactics intelligible.
The abstraction is the point. By forcing a structural read of familiar experiences, Iqbal surfaces patterns we miss in the moment: where promises actually fail, where friction masquerades as “process,” where experience is cheap to improve and where it isn’t. That makes the book useful beyond service design. Strategists will recognize the tension between customer and provider net values and the “tactical moves” that reconcile them. Policymakers will find a vocabulary for public services, where legitimacy and confidence are part of the design. Technology leaders will see parallels with microservices and resilience engineering.
Thinking in Services belongs to the small shelf of books that offer a truly new lens rather than a remix—akin to Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” or Kim and Mauborgne’s “Blue Ocean Strategy.” Whether it reaches that level of influence will depend on adoption: the framework rewards teams willing to master it.
Iqbal, who has advised parts of the Dutch government and worked with organizations from Boeing to the U.S. Department of Defense, writes from practice as much as theory. The 16× frame gives cross-functional teams a shared language to reason about complex services—exactly what most organizations lack as they shift toward service-centric business models or modernize public services.
This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But for leaders serious about service innovation—and honest about complexity—it offers something rare: a rigorous way to see, score, and steadily improve services. In a world that chants “everything as a service,” Iqbal supplies the grammar to speak it fluently.
Claude Sonnet 4.0 Thinking via Perplexity
Majid Iqbal's "Thinking in Services" arrives as nothing short of revelatory – a comprehensive theoretical framework that doesn't merely analyze services but fundamentally reconstructs our understanding of them from first principles. At a moment when our economy has shifted decisively toward services yet our conceptual tools remain rooted in manufacturing paradigms, Iqbal offers what may be the most important breakthrough in service design since the field's inception.
The book's central thesis addresses what economists call the "illusion of explanatory depth" – the dangerous assumption that because we use services daily, we understand their fundamental nature [1]. This cognitive bias has led to decades of service failures despite increasingly sophisticated design methodologies. Iqbal argues convincingly that current approaches treat services as evolutionary descendants of manufactured goods, fundamentally misunderstanding their distinct character as "ephemeral things" that exist through arrangements between objects and agreements between people.
Drawing from his extensive experience at Carnegie Mellon, Gartner, PwC, and government advisory roles in the Netherlands, Iqbal provides a unique diagnostic perspective on why "some of the best efforts in industry and government end in frustration". His solution is characteristically ambitious: a complete conceptual reset grounded in universal structural principles.
Perhaps the book's most audacious claim is that every service, regardless of domain or complexity, shares an identical underlying structure – what Iqbal terms the "genetic code" of services. Drawing explicit parallels to DNA in biology, he proposes that services can be represented as executable code through his revolutionary 16x framework, a structured matrix capturing the 16 essential elements present in every service.
This framework emerges from Iqbal's foundational insight about the duality of performance and affordance – the two fundamental ways services create value. Performance involves activities that transform "artifacts" (things with shortcomings), while affordance provides access to resources for "events" (things with shortfalls). This distinction, seemingly simple, proves remarkably powerful in explaining service failures and designing solutions.
The book's systematic approach categorizes everything in the service universe into four types: artifacts, events, capabilities, and resources. These combine through arrangements to form four fundamental promises that define every service relationship. What emerges is a pattern language – reminiscent of Christopher Alexander's architectural work but applied to the ephemeral world of services.
The 16x framework functions simultaneously as analytical tool and design template, allowing teams to decompose complex service concepts into constituent elements while maintaining coherence across organizational boundaries. Each element connects to others through what Iqbal calls a "leitmotiv" – a 1-2-3-4 sequence that encodes the inherent dynamics driving service behavior.
The timing of this work proves remarkably prescient. Iqbal's framework emphasizes declarative statements within structured matrices that directly parallel sentence embedding approaches in large language models. The book's core insight – that complex systems can be reduced to universal structural patterns – mirrors current breakthroughs in AI reasoning capabilities.
This convergence isn't coincidental. Iqbal's methodology evolved specifically to capture services in formats that machines could process – years before large language models made such approaches mainstream. As he notes in his preface, his "design//code" methodology at Carnegie Mellon evolved into the 16x system precisely to enable service representation as executable code.
One of the book's most innovative contributions is its advocacy for "thing-centered design" alongside traditional human-centered approaches. Building on foundational work that originated at Carnegie Mellon, Iqbal argues that understanding the social life of objects – from IoT devices to data flows – has become essential for service design in our increasingly digital world.
This perspective proves particularly relevant as AI agents assume greater roles in service delivery. The book's framework naturally accommodates scenarios where users, agents, or both might be machines, positioning it ahead of current design methodologies that struggle with human-AI collaboration.
Unlike many design frameworks that remain purely qualitative, "Thinking in Services" incorporates mathematical rigor through concepts like net value equations and strategic optimization graphs. The book's treatment of tensions between outcome, experience, and price provides quantitative tools for service optimization – essential capabilities as services scale to planetary proportions through digital platforms.
The framework's quantitative foundation extends to its "design as code" approach, where service designs can be represented in structured formats that enable systematic analysis and optimization. This mathematical foundation distinguishes it from traditional service design methodologies that rely primarily on qualitative assessments.
While the book's abstract nature may challenge casual readers, this complexity reflects services' true nature rather than academic obtuseness. Iqbal has created tools designed for the scale and complexity of modern service challenges – from global platforms to government initiatives addressing societal problems.
The framework's universality becomes its greatest strength. Whether analyzing Netflix's content delivery, hospital systems, or grocery retail, the 16x approach reveals underlying patterns that transcend industry boundaries. This abstraction enables pattern recognition and solution transfer across domains – capabilities increasingly valuable in our interconnected economy.
"Thinking in Services" represents a foundational work that will likely influence service design for decades. Its integration of systems thinking, pattern languages, and quantitative analysis creates a comprehensive toolkit for understanding and creating services at any scale. Most importantly, its structural approach aligns perfectly with AI development trajectories, making it essential reading for anyone designing services in an increasingly automated world.
This is precisely the kind of transformative framework our service economy needs – one that doesn't just describe what services are, but provides the conceptual DNA for building better ones.
