[avighnay]

I would not blame the client, any industry's value is a direct reflection of how the industry projects the value of its produce.

We software engineers more often than not, project the 'I can build that easily' view (you can see that in this thread too). Many of us are too eager to put our engineering ego before business sense. We forget that it is one thing to demonstrate technical feasibility and quite another to build a finished product. Even the smallest piece of software needs real good effort to make it complete.

This is compounded by having substantial pieces of software available as open source and customers always read that as free as in free beer. It takes quite some effort to make them see otherwise.

When we say its easy, when many of us give our work away for free (even with good intentions), when we put engineering before business, we are steadily moving software in the path to being a cheap commodity.

All this is not even considering availability of software talent in countries where the skill set is available for much less...