Seated to my left at a meeting I was attending the other day was a very sharp web developer. He teaches continuing education courses at a major university here in town. His day job is working for a local custom web development group. The've been fairly successful since the mid 1990s, with over half-dozen full-time employees. But things weren't going well for their group. They're all but shutting down,

cutting back to the original partners. What went wrong? He didn't understand. They were bidding on some high-ticket development projects, some in six figures. But all their business has suddenly dried up. But they do such great work developing custom content management systems (CMSs) in a proprietary language. In my opinion, 'custom' and 'proprietary' were two strikes. The weak economy made three and they're out.

After that meeting, one of the other attendees stopped me in the hall. He thanked me for pointing him in the direction of the open-source CMS Drupal. He'd never worked with it before, but he reported that after about twelve hours of working with it, he had a complete, functional e-commerce site. He was very gratefu. Granted, this is a bright guy who can pick up a CMS with a farily steep learning curve in a couple of days, but he did it. I encouraged him to get involved in the local user group. I hope he will. He'll learn a lot and soon have much to share. 

The counterpoints of these two conversations that afternoon were just too strong to ignore. As I've said before, the era of the custom CMS is over. Proprietary CMSs are the next to go. My company's keeping very busy implementing open-source CMS solutions.