Dollars for Services

Tim Bray laments the fact that IBM made $46 billion dollars selling services and $96 billion selling products. I think he sees this as a failure to produce easy to implement systems.

Perhaps it is my services providing bias, but this makes sense to me. The challenges developing and implementing good technology solutions are more often human than technological. Finding out how people use and could potentially use information systems should be the focus of IT development. If this means resources need to spent on it, spend. Users will be better served.