Anecdote from 1996 in the UK, back when web consultancy was still relatively small, but growing: fma (my employer at the time) bid for one web design job against competition. When we got the job, we learned that our bid was the highest by a factor of two! And we got the job because we were "reassuringly expensive"!
Folks who don't understand a new field will throw money at it because they want a serious professional to hold their hand. As the old 80s aphorism put it, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"; an executive at an FT100 company, dabbling in the web for the first time, would expect to spend lots of money at the steep start of the learning curve. But once they began to get a clue about how difficult (or easy) the job really was, they'd start to play hardball.
And that's what the early web consultancies didn't understand: they were living on borrowed time, and basing their growth on a commodity that could only scale linearly (web developer/programmer hours).
Folks who don't understand a new field will throw money at it because they want a serious professional to hold their hand. As the old 80s aphorism put it, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"; an executive at an FT100 company, dabbling in the web for the first time, would expect to spend lots of money at the steep start of the learning curve. But once they began to get a clue about how difficult (or easy) the job really was, they'd start to play hardball.
And that's what the early web consultancies didn't understand: they were living on borrowed time, and basing their growth on a commodity that could only scale linearly (web developer/programmer hours).