Awesome comments, thanks for taking the time to drop your thoughts in. Believe it or not, I have enjoyed reading all of the responses to this article including the critical ones. It underscores for me that I needed to do a better job explaining in what capacity I meant specialization. If you read above I have a couple responses in to clarify what I meant in terms of specialization and what I failed to convey to the readers – that in fact I do not disagree with the comments that largely argue against #1 but that I did not provide adequate context for specialization. I won’t rewrite it in this comment though you may find I clarified some of that particular point. I’m actually looking to address #1 more specifically in another post altogether, so look for that soon.

Isotope e-commerce has come from idea to a working early beta project with only three people conceiving and planning and two people actually coding for it, but that has provided us a tremendous benefit in developing a paradigm-changing approach to e-commerce that in particular is developer and designer-friendly. I would love to spend more time talking about it with you – I’ll send you a message so we can try and have a chat perhaps on skype.

So why do I agree with Jacob and Simon regarding Specialisation versus generalisation and not Fred. Well I am a JOAT hybrid designer/developer with 12 years experience. It is this wide reaching expertise that I think gives me an edge over many of my peers. How can being an expert in or at least extremely competent, in many areas rather than just one, be determental to my career?

I am drafting an article at the moment arguing that to be sustainable in our industry you will have to move away from specialisation. To save you reading the article, I argue that we must offer an overall web solution/strategy to our clients with real ROI. To provide this we will have to have a far reaching understanding and expertise in many fields. (yes we could outsource but that ha its own implications)

Our industry is so dynamic that in order to stay relevant we must adapt and add to our skillsets. My point being what happens if you choose the wrong thing to specialise in, ooops!

I can’t deny that I champion this point of view because I would prefer to see an industry full of passionate artisans and skilled craftspeople rather than faceless, bottom-line obsessed, sales driven entities using sweatshop production line specialisation.

Same reason I think point 5 is only relevant if your aspirations are to grow and grow and grow until you are bought out by one of the entities I referred to above!

On a more positive ending, the other 3 points I couldn’t agree with you more Fred, especially neglecting existing clients.

P.S hows that e-commerce solution coming along?

Thanks!