A Frog in the Valley

Towards mass-customization? The Power of Free - O’Reilly XML Blog :

This is where I see the industry heading overall - the base software becomes freely available, but the need for people with the skills to customize that software also rises. Now this runs counter to the way that most corporations, especially those that are �??software vendors�?�, operate. Customizations generally don�??t scale. This means that your programmer�??s work to solve a given problem for one customer cannot be turned into a solution for another customer without paying that programmer for the second customization.

I really like this POV, it rings “true” to me. It is a gamechanging trend, I need to wrap my head a bit more around this subject to put in writing what my intuition has been telling me for a while (a few years). Call it my spider frog-sense…