Introduction About four years ago, a guy wrote an article in the house publication of Harvard Business School—the Harvard Business Review—called “IT Doesn’t Matter,” which really captured the spirit of the post dot-com era, and the pessimism that went along with it. It essentially said, “Look, we’re spending huge amounts of money on what is essentially a utility. It’s like electricity, it’s like water, it’s like toner paper, or paper clips.” It’s good, right? We like this stuff. It’s actually useful input to your business. But we all can buy it, we all have access to it. It’s getting cheaper all the time, we’re not writing it ourselves, we’re buying it off the shelf. Everyone can buy the same stuff off the shelf. As a result, none of us are getting ahead of anyone else, and we’re in this massive spending frenzy in an arms race that’s not getting anyone anything important.