IT doesn't matter

I was reminded of Nicholas Carr's now-famous Harvard Business Review article today reading a blog from a VC who remains a die-hard believer in enterprise software. Carr's most daunting claim was that IT has become a commodity input, irrelevant as a source of strategic advantage. While many in the IT and software industry have commented on the maturation of the software industry citing consolidation and eventual death of the software enterprise business, many others are insightful enough to mark this period as perhaps a line in the sand for the industry. A line marked by a period of black art, hard-manual labor, heroic feats of intervention to keep systems up and running, all at a price that has exponentially grown and kept slightly in check (artificially, at least) by offshoring. . . to a wave of new innovation driven by the power of the internet, long tail marketing, and perhaps a move to transition software into a more industrial discipline than could never have been conceived before by the likes of mainstream vendors like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP or Symantec. More later. . .