I'm going to talk about a very fundamental change that is going on

in the very fabric of the modern economy.

And to talk about that, I'm going to go back to the beginning,

because in the beginning were commodities.

Commodities are things that you grow in the ground, raise on the ground or pull out of the ground:

basically, animal, mineral, vegetable.

And then you extract them out of the ground,

and sell them on the open marketplace.

Commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy

that lasted for millennia.

But then along came the industrial revolution,

and then goods became the predominant economic offering,

where we used commodities as a raw material

to be able to make or manufacture goods.

So, we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.

Well, what then happened over the last 50 or 60 years,

is that goods have become commoditized.

Commoditized: where they're treated like a commodity,

where people don't care who makes them.

They just care about three things and three things only:

price, price and price.

Now, there's an antidote to commoditization,

and that is customization.

My first book was called "Mass Customization" --

it came up a couple of times yesterday --

and how I discovered this progression of economic value

was realizing that customizing a good

automatically turned it into a service,

because it was done just for a particular person,

because it wasn't inventoried,

it was delivered on demand to that individual person.

So, we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy.

But over the past 10 or 20 years, what's happened is that

services are being commoditized as well.

Long-distance telephone service sold on price, price, price;

fast-food restaurants with all their value pricing;

and even the Internet is commoditizing not just goods,

but services as well.

What that means is that it's time