I’ve been thinking more about Nicholas Carr’s argument that IT has become a commodity. At first I thought his thesis was pretty compelling, except that I didn’t think IT had reached sufficient maturity to be a true commodity. A while ago, though, I had a thought that makes me wonder.

The two examples he uses of technologies that initially provided strategic advantages but matured into commodities were railroads and electricity. These are both signature technologies of the industrial revolution. One of the hallmarks of industrialization is mass production, where large numbers of identical products are manufactured and distributed at significantly lower costs than what applies to customized items.

However, we’ve now moved into the next, post-industrial stage of society, the information age. (Of course this has been driven to a large degree by computers.) A current trend is an increasing ability to provide somewhat customized products at mass-production prices, through “build-to-order” options and such. Will this apply to software too? When I’ve talked to people at shops that use commercial ERPs they’ve often indicated that they spend a lot of time and resources customizing the ERP to meet their needs, so I wonder if the analogy between IT and industrial-age technologies like railroads and electricity is fundamentally incorrect.