Great success! Thanks for posting.

And you've got a point. As far as expertise, Google or sites like Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) would be our biggest competitors. If we were to, say, graph "necessity of computer help" versus "computer expertise," we'd probably see that as people learn and master basic tasks, their need for help declines. There's even a point where it probably drops to zero as people's confidence and self-sufficiency allow them to learn as they solve problems.

There is a point, however, where you've mastered N+1 programming languages, dreamt of database schemas, and have your internal home network's security rivaling that of numerous corporate entities. And you find yourself staring at the blank screen that was once your beloved home computer, wondering when the last time your automatic backups kicked off. In some cases, you can try to troubleshoot the issue yourself. And if you don't happen to have a closet full of spare parts, and you live in Alaska, you've got at least 2 weeks before you can get your precious back.

To quote the Firefly Episode Safe:

"Sometimes you just need a doctor."

We aren't saving any lives, but we're all at risk for hardware failure. There's also the case that, at the very far end of our "necessity of computer help" curve, you start to get into strange, obscure territory, that defies Google searches and requires a human being. Such a thing I wrote about a while back, where the departure of Title Wave's main expert has left them with a non-functioning online presence for years. IT consulting, particularly development consulting, is ungodly expensive, and as far as I can tell, there doesn't exist any community for a place like Title Wave to fall back on should they need access to people at the far end of the curve.