The customer is king. Really!

On July 21st the Wall Street Journal Published Jason Fry's final "Real Time" column. At the end of this column's 6-year run, Mr. Fry took the opportunity to muse about the trend in consumer empowerment. Titled "Taking Control of the Digital World", Mr. Fry reflects on the trend from album sales to singles downloads, from planning an evening around prime-time schedules to having "Tivo" as a verb, or from waiting for a print newspaper to headlines sent to our email inbox.

These are wonderful things and Limitless Horizons hopes to encourage them all. There is no "but" to start the next sentence. We strongly believe that the consumer, in our case the client, runs the show and that anything that enables the consumer's voice is a good thing.

We believe in blogs that you can email to. We believe in web services that come to you where you are even if that means working harder to facilitate efficient cellphone delivery or handsome printouts. We believe in content that you need presented to you even if it started out in a foreign language.

After all, we benefit from the same trend. In the 1980s we had to get compilers from hardware manufacturers-- our programming references were published by folks like IBM and Texas Instruments. By the 1990s this had opened up a bit and software companies like Microsoft and Borland told us how we could program. But then there was a sea change-- Linus Torvalds' Linux took hold. Sun published the full Java APIs. HTML and the web took off like a shot. Eventually even IBM joined in and we got the Eclipse platform.

Now we don't have to wait for a Microsoft to give us an API. We can choose ala carte from a wide variety of wonderful technologies. Does the client want just a cleanly designed, easy to post blog? Great, Wordpress to the rescue. Does the client want a full content management system with Web 2.0 user groups? There's always Drupal. Or maybe, you're a large publisher with a formal document management workflow? There's Knowledge Tree or Alfresco-based solutions. Then again, maybe you're a medical firm with a need to manage specialized vocabulary for a global staff. Well, that's a bit trickier, but we can always take a framework and then add in the PHP and SQL backend that suits your needs.

As the client, you get to choose the solution that you want. You no longer have to buy the word processor with 30-gazillion features just to get 10 that matter to you. And Limitless Horizons can do that for you, because we can select what suits you from a wide variety of programming tools.

It's a wonderful world, this whole Web 2.0, open source, disaggregated thing.