Even as a commodity, IT still matters??

John Seely Brown and John Hagel wrote a comment on Financial Times trying to show that, contrary to the view of Nicholas Carr that "as IT is commoditising it doesn't matter", IT really matter.

Although we can agree with Hagel and Brown that there are trends that make use of IT's commoditisation and can provide a level of competitive advantage to some companies, their reasoning doesn't give a clear explanation about how the two trends they see can benefit the users of IT.
Even as a commodity, IT still matters:
"In fact, we believe that a surprising marriage between two different technology trends, both of which rely on IT 'commoditisation', will give successful businesses an edge over their competitors.

The first is grid computing - the process of tying together large numbers of stand-alone machines into a single pool of computing resources.
....
The second force leading to IT commoditisation involves the software on which companies run many of their business processes, or applications.
...
The commoditisation brought about by grid computing and the new software architectures will make it much easier to connect the IT resources of different enterprises. The scope for business innovation will no longer be constrained by the boundaries of the enterprise. Instead, companies will find that they can serve their customers better by orchestrating the activities of other companies in growing networks.
....
IT resources alone will not bestow strategic advantage - they never have. Strategic advantage will not even come from the growing ability to reconfigure these resources. As has always been the case, it will come from companies' ability to innovate around new products and processes - an ability that IT commoditisation can only deepen."

I wrote a letter to the Financial Times editor and it was published, which can be read here