Response from: david foster

"Once the industry moves from an integrated architecture to a modular architecture, the money is made not by the integrator, but by the maker of the subsystems and components." This seems to be generally true, in my experience, but is counterintuitive to many companies. People seem to instinctively that that "higher on the value chain" means "more profitable." This is particularly true of managers without a technical background, who can (for example) more easily identify with a car than with a fuel injection system, or more easily identify with an ERP application than with a database management system.