There is a massive brouhaha brewing over a recent piece by Columbia University professor ELi Noam who writes in The Financial Times that we are headed towards a future where IT fails. Whoops! Shades of another article by another person sitting in the ivory tower of academia.

bq. International phone call prices have dropped, and with internet telephony will move to near-zero. Web advertising prices have collapsed. Much of world and national news is provided for free. A lot of software is distributed or acquired gratis. Academic articles are being distributed online for free. TV and radio have always been free unless taxed.

Missing the point, because in order to make a phone call, you need to have some sort of network and connectivity to the network. The value has gone from the call to the conduit. Talk about Software! Well – Ben and Mena Trott gave away MoveableType and then created TypePad. Value is in ease of use of TypePad. Noam misses the value shift in these changing times. The way I see it, commoditization of everything is a curse for many, opportunity for few. I said so in my old story, The Rise of The Instant Company.