I remember reading an article a while back about how professional photography has become a commodity. You can find and license any imaginable photograph, for pennies, in minutes. From the best photographers in the world. So from a business perspective, photography as a pure art has been devalued to almost nothing. Nobody pays you to take the very best possible photo.

So why do people still hire photographers? To put themselves or their product into a photo. Most photographers are no longer paid to take the very best photos, but to make their photos specific to what the particular client cares about. That's something that can't be commoditized.

I think that's where software is now as an industry. Very few of us these days get to innovate at a "pure art" level. Instead, we get paid to pull together a bespoke solution that's sensitive to a given business and its needs. It isn't novel at the macro-level, only at the micro-level.

This can be kind of depressing, but it's also a little comforting that those micro-level solutions are so hard to fully commoditize. As long as the real world is messy and varied, the leaves in the software tree will have to be too, and there will be work that needs doing.