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Scarcity used to be for engineers. Remember we had H1B visa processes changed to get more engineers into the country. Now, we want to keep them out of country, and no wonder Congress is confused by our industry and the lobbying efforts of our industry.

Now, the scarcity is management. It is scary to see the management processes and the management maturity of small companies these days in the software business.

Macro-Economic Impact

Along with interesting organization remarks like the above, there's an interesting thread about software/IT innovation vs. renovation. Innovation is making something new that's better and great, renovation is making what already exists better and great.

In software, we tend to pay attention to innovation much more: forget that old crap, install the new stuff, and it'll fix all your problems! The compromise is backwards compatibility: install our new stuff, and we'll still work with that old stuff until you get rid of it.

I'm not sure if there's a big difference between renovation in the above sense, and integration in the sense of "app Z can 'talk' to and 'work' with app Y." Indeed, I think that's what the big desire is for customers: they don't want to install a brand new application, they just want to add new features to existing products, and fix bugs in existing products. That is, maybe there's something to moving from releasing versions of software, to releasing new "featurelets" or plugins to the software.