An excellent quote from Quinn Keast’s What, then, are we paying for?:

Paying for software isn’t paying for a solution. It’s paying for someone else to own a problem.

This feels the software equivalent of “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Another quote that goes to the heart of the matter:

It’s paying for someone who has the taste and the context to think through the details. For the operations and structures necessary to scale it, maintain it, and solve even bigger things.1 For the relationships that connect and abstract and expand upon the problem in ways that they can’t do, because they own the specific solution, not the whole problem.

Also ties in well with this observation from Jeff Johnson:

The question is not how fast someone can create software. The question is how long after creating the software will someone support it.