Developer Dilemna

As if the current market conditions are not turbulent enough, now we have another form of imbroglio that stand infront of us. Just like the roller coaster transformation from centralized to distributed and back from distributed to centralized networking approaches, now we have talk of producing customized solutions but yet not too specific, but to make it a generic solution that can be scaled up to make it customized. I think I have already confused you enough. To put it simple, the demand of today is to have solutions that combine software intelligence but yet simple enough to be malleable to cater to taste of ever dynamic customer demands. The main challenge is that by the very nature of software development, beyond certain point, it makes no sense to sqeeze it to any further levels of genericity and it might prove counter-productive effort wise. I mean if you try to make the solution too generic, the seemingly LITTLE extra effort to configure to make it work for specific customer need, will in most cases turn out to be larger effort than anticipated. .I heard somebody saying when a programmer face an issue they will look at Generic solution but ironically now they will have two issues to face. So, one can not ALWAYS get driven by the fancy sounding word "Generic". So, where do we draw the line. Unfortunately, we dont have any specifc..err..generic guidelines for this. All I can say evaluate the ecosystem, capabilities, uniqueness of the solution and most importantly find out the possible need to reuse the solution in future, and then decide the course