have we all been wrong about software commodization?

Filed in archive Technology on July 28, 2004

Jonathan Schwartz obviously has a very different position as most people on the issue of ongoing commodization in the software industry:

"A whole host of folks like to believe the computing industry is commoditizing. I don't buy it. Some technology products are certainly becoming interchangeable (why buy WebSphere when you can deploy the J2EE Reference Implementation for free?) - but what's really commoditizing? bandwidth. Not software, not hardware, bandwidth. It's coming out of the wall in your house and office, just like a three prong outlet provides another commodity, electricity (and broadband, soon enough). "

Mhh I think he's wrong and fails to reckognize the ongoing trend to use standard (mostly open source) software services. But I fully understand we he's arguing against commodization :)

Via Rajesh.