This is a story about the difference between Space Vehicles and Wheat.  Space Vehicles are an expensive engineered solution and buyers of these rocket sleds worry about performance a lot more than price.  Wheat, on the other hand, is a commodity.  A bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat; what more than price do you need to know?

Not a week goes by that I don't hear someone in the security industry bemoaning the fact that the industry has become commoditized;  cameras, DVRs, monitors, card readers, and all the other common industry products are on a race to the bottom on pricing.  The implication is always that the fault lies with someone "off shore".   The fact that someone can make a $50 DVR, put it on a boat, and still sell it in this country at a profit produces a lot of head shaking.

So here's the thing: all of these products started out as profitable engineered solutions; prox readers from Indala, cameras from Burle…  They weren't cheap and they weren't commodities.  The manufacturers were some of the few people in the world that knew how to make and deploy those devices.  End users paid extra to buy that knowledge.  But over time, in this industry, as in all industries, those engineered solutions moved to become commodities, as more people learned the technology, and vendors became more plentiful.  We are not alone; Back in the days of Zenith, televisions were a "space vehicle".  Today, anything smaller than a 60" LCD gets treated and priced like wheat.  Computers and software used to be engineered solutions.  Today, more wheat.  The reality is that any engineered solution becomes a commodity over time.  Some slower, some faster, but they all succumb. 

There is only one answer to the problem.  The industry has to keep filling up the hopper at the engineered solutions end.  When you introduce revolutionary products like say an iPad or a Prius Hybrid, you enjoy the benefits of jumping out of the commodity world.  We don't do that very often in the security industry because we have a tough time making those kinds of investments.  Just as importantly, most companies seem to be comfortable in an evolutionary development process rather than taking the risks of being revolutionary.  But there is a price to be paid for not pushing for products that are more than 10% better than the last generation;  you wake up one morning and find that you are making wheat that a lot of people know how to make.