C H A P T E R 3
An Almost Perfect Commodity
The Fate of Computer Hardware and Software
IS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY an infrastructural technology? Is its potential for providing competitive advantage fading as it becomes more powerful, more affordable, and more standardized and as its implications for business practice and industry structure become more evident and better understood? Is it, in short, fated to become a commodity input like rail transport, telephone service, and electricity?1
Such questions are critically important to business managers, but they’re not easy to answer. Information technology would appear to differ from earlier infrastructural technologies in a fundamental way: It takes both a physical form, as hardware, and an abstract ...
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