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As with other industrial processes commercial IT has moved in most cases from a custom-order, craft-based industry where the product was tailored to fit the customer; to multi-use components taken off the shelf to find the best-fit in any situation. Mass-production has greatly reduced costs and IT is available to the smallest organization.
LEO was hardware tailored for a single client. Today, [[P5 (microarchitecture)|Intel Pentium]] and compatible chips are standard and become parts of other components which are combined as needed. One individual change of note was the freeing of computers and removable storage from protected, air-filtered environments. [[Microsoft]] and [[IBM]] at various times have been influential enough to impose order on IT and the resultant standardizations allowed specialist software to flourish.
Software is available off the shelf: apart from products such as Microsoft Office and IBM Lotus, there are also specialist packages for payroll and personnel management, account maintenance and customer management, to name a few. These are highly specialized and intricate components of larger environments, but they rely upon common conventions and interfaces.
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