The faint-hearted should cover their ears now. Most sectors have their profanities and, as the downturn has shown, internet technology appears more like "most sectors" by the day. In high-tech, the dirty word is commodity.

A recent conversation with a senior partner at Apax, the European venture capital firm, suggests why. He was explaining his company's decision to invest - together with a second VC, Amadeus Partners - more than £30m (e49m) in a start-up that designs and manufactures servers to operate on Bluetooth, the nascent wireless standard.

Long-term, he said, the company would be out of "the box business", preferring to license its intellectual property designs and sell software. "We are very clear about the danger of being a provider of commoditised technology," he said.

Pause, and rewind that statement. A danger to whom, exactly? The justification for backing start-ups to research, develop and sell breakthrough technologies can be reduced to a single argument. This holds that the product itself must be so specialised that the best way of bringing it to market is by the creation of an entirely new vehicle. Otherwise, existing market players would release their own versions. At the same time, products can't be too niche or their creators would never win sufficient orders to be profitable.

For tech start-ups there is a fulcrum to be found for balancing the opposing needs of innovation and standardisation, outdistancing the competition and not overshooting the market or, in bottom line terms, creating volume and sustaining margin. Again, if this sounds as if it would apply to "most sectors", that is because it does. The difference is that for the so-called old economy, the fulcrum for technology adoption is radically different.

Take the most established example of business technology: the desktop computer. It may be bad news for Fujitsu-Siemens, Dell and the other PC manufacturers that consumers decide between hardware principally by cost, but it hardly appears that way to buyers. Most PCs offer the same combination of chips and operating software, which leaves price a major factor. Attempts to persuade existing customers to upgrade to faster chips or more sophisticated operating systems are increasingly being met with scepticism. Product lifetimes may be shortening for manufacturers, but the anecdotal evidence is that replacement cycles among customers are lengthening.

In one sense, tech companies are victims of their own success. The more companies are convinced that technology is crucial to their existence, the less likely they will risk disruption to their IT systems through upgrades and enhancements.

Future historians searching for a common cause behind the downfall of dotcom and the many bricks and mortar e-ventures now burning through cash, will surely find it not in bad marketing or travel perks, but in the expense and complexity of building bespoke technology platforms.

To the mainstream economy, packaged technology is not a threat, but a necessity. Commodities are the lifeblood of any economy. This is not to say that all tech outfits should be low-margin utility-type suppliers, but merely that what is bad for the tech sector is not necessarily bad for everyone else.

And since every internet argument must have a neologism, let's welcome the era of dot

comm-odities. Now there - if I say so myself - is language that is foul.carlos.grande@ft.com