Recently, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman wrote a column in which he told of how a marketing agency run by a childhood friend coped with today's smaller client budgets by leveraging a host of inexpensive online tools that allowed them to put together sophisticated advertising campaigns at a fraction of what they once cost. Friedman saw this as an example of what he calls the Great Inflection—the wide availability of low-cost, high-powered tools that is dramatically increasing personal and organizational productivity.

I had reason to think about that column—and some implications which Friedman doesn’t address—while preparing for the re-launch of the Athlon web site, the first complete redesign of our site in several years. I decided to build the site on Squarespace, a hosting company that had be recommended to me by Heidi Cool, a web consultant who had been the webmaster at Case Western Reserve.

Squarespace, whose clients range from individuals to global advertising companies, is another example of Freidman’s Great Inflection—a powerful, cheap tool that can be harnessed by a wide range of non-specialists. This type of tool, however, carries with it a tradeoff between how powerful it is and the initial time you have to spend learning how to use it. This “learning curve vs. power” tradeoff is really the Great Inflection version of price vs. quality. Compared with products offered by better-known web hosts, Squarespace definitely requires an upfront investment of brain cells. Its documentation lays out the basic logic of the platform, but there’s no way around spending some time learning by trial and error (as one of their instructional videos explicitly points out).

From a business perspective, this is a significant risk that Squarespace carries—that potential clients won’t make it up the learning curve and will instead defect to a less-powerful but easier-to-use platform. They mitigate against this, though, through their top-flight client support team, who act more like coaches and consultants than traditional tech support. Indeed, while many companies do everything they can to get you to not contact their support departments, Squarespace actually encourages people to contact them with questions.

What does this say about business in the age of the Great Inflection?  More and more products and services will not be about giving clients something, but rather empowering clients to do something for themselves that was previously out of reach. For some time it’s been common to talk about the “client-supplier partnership,” but what often goes unspoken is how much harder clients have to work in this new relationship. To successfully make your way though a product by trial and error is a skill in and of itself, and it is a lot more frustrating than a prepackaged solution (but if done right, it’s also often cheaper, better and faster).

The companies that venture into this arena, for their part, need to fully understand what they are getting into. They are not merely supplying products but unleashing ambitions. Even sophisticated clients, when handed powerful tools, are likely to react by trying to do something they haven’t done before. Whether the supplier likes it or not, they are the ones the client will turn to for help that goes far beyond routine technical issues.

With clients more empowered, what does it mean for the consultants and service providers that did things for clients that they can now do for themselves?  Well, as Friedman points out, it means that the value they add is now focused even more on the ideas, perspective and experience they bring to the process. As powerful, inexpensive and widely available tools level the playing field, the advantage will come from how the tools are used. As a corollary, there is also a need for those who can guide the process, steering clients to the right tools for their needs, handling the tasks that the client would still rather outsource and accelerating path up the learning curve for the functions they take in-house.

The Great Inflection requires not just new capabilities but an embrace of the do-it-yourself ethos. For those who do so and for those who help others to do so, there is more than ample opportunity.