The Gap.
What does the ordinary, non medical, population know about modern medicine and surgery? What little could they learn flicking through newspapers or internet articles, and perhaps a bit from popular science TV channels. However, in reality, the situation in medicine is at least a few years ahead than what people think it really is.
Grand Canyon, USA.
Fracture
As an example, it is common knowledge that a bone fracture is treated with a cast to immobilize the leg as the bones will fuse and heal over time. All the cartoons and movies show actors getting out from the hospital with cast on their arms or legs. But that is just an easier method for the movie director to show to the audience that the character has a broken bone.
Reality is that most broken bones, at least the big ones, are treated by internal immobilization – a titanium rod hammered through the center of the bone connecting the two (or more) fragments. There is no need for an external cast, as this titanium rod offers much better immobilization from within. Of course, for the movies this presents a problem as it is not obvious on the first sight that our main hero has a broken bone.
Before & after. There is no cast.
Disparity
Similar disparity between what people know and what is really happening exists everywhere. There is always a few years gap between the two standpoints, but often it is pretty easy to bring up to speed an interested person. Want to know how really the car industry produces cars? Watching a couple of documentaries will shine light on the newest methods of aluminium moulding, new ways paint is applied and new routines in testing. Of course, to get the finer and detailed knowledge it still takes quite a bit of learning, but at least the outlines are easy to understand.
However, there are some jobs and entire branches which advance so rapidly that it is pretty hard to catch up once the general knowledge falls behind a few years.
Enter web – and overall digital – development.
The whole digital revolution and digital industry is expanding and advancing at a geometric progress rate. Existing standards and production methods are advancing rapidly. Completely new blocks are being added every few years as well. iPhone revolutionized the way people interact with mobile phones and added whole new block in the digital industry - App development. A couple of years later, iPad introduced new viable production blocks. It further advanced the App development segment as tablets follow different rules for use than phones, and it made the web development even more complex as websites should be at least a little bit modified for imprecise touches instead of pixel perfect precision desktop mouse offers.
The combination of rapid progress in all areas in digital development with addition of entire new blocks every few years interweave with each other and make the whole industry skyrocket.
This means that today the gap in knowledge between how people perceive the digital industry functions and how it actually functions is wider than ever. And it is widening by the day.
In the year 2000 if the common knowledge of the population about digital development was how it was a few years before (say 1995) it was easy to bring up to speed someone who really had to understand what is actually going on.
Today, in the 2012, if someone lags a few years behind and is stuck with knowledge in 2007 or worse, bringing them up to speed is an immense task.
A tip of the iceberg covering just website development; Adobe Flash is phasing out being replaced with HTML5 and CSS3 technologies, browsers are more widespread than ever and their standardization is an illusion, tablet browsers are looming over the horizon to be equal in pageviews as their desktop brethren introducing whole new set of user interface guidelines, typography and availability of non-standard fonts, mobile versions of sites are basically a must, responsive website layouts, completely new line of devices waiting to bloom, security, connectivity, API changes on widespread services like Facebook, …
So what's the problem?
The demand for web sites and web related products has never been bigger. Everyone, and their grandmother, wants a top notch professional website. But with the general knowledge being perpetually stuck a few years behind it is becoming difficult if not outright impossible to explain to the interested customer what would it take (both time-wise and budget-wise) to produce and maintain a top level web site.
The gap in knowledge increases by the day. We have yet to see what will happen when the gap becomes impossible to bridge in a reasonable amount of meetings with a client.
Perhaps the agency type web development will perish and absolutely each larger project will require in-house professionals to handle.
Or perhaps the clients and the general population will simply understand that high end professional web development is getting really complex and appreciate the knowledge required to produce and maintain such a product.
Whatever the case is, the gap is getting bigger.