Solutions?

So many companies now are talking about solutions. Is that really what they are providing? I think that most companies are selling "boxes." A lot of people talk about solution selling but in the end the solution they try to sell ends up being whatever they happen to have on their shelf; isn't that really a box sale?

Evidentially, I am not the only one that feels this way about the technology industry. Tom Foremski at the Silicon Valley Watcher pointed out the same thing with HP in a post he wrote titled Is HP an IT services company? He points out:

Whenever I used to hear Ann Livermore, or Carly Fiorina, the message over the past seven years has been that HP is an IT solutions company. I didn't hear a thing about IT solutions, just a bunch of stuff about application performance from HP operating systems and servers. I didn't hear about any specific applications, just "average" applications, nothing about IT solutions of any kind.

In my opinion, most everyone that talks about "solutions" are really just relabeling their "boxes." If you want to sell a solution, you really need to focus on the problem first. If you don't look at the business problem your product solves, then there is no way, in good conscious, that you can call what you provide as a solution. Sounds to me like HP has fallen into its old model of pushing products... does that surprise anyone?