Is Wal-Mart's IT a Commodity?

Nick Carr writes about Wal-Mart's IT, its distinctive capabilities and value, with lots of comments:

' ... " I never viewed computers as anything more than necessary overhead," Sam Walton once said. Nevertheless, after I wrote "IT Doesn't Matter" back in 2003, critics would routinely present Wal-Mart as the killer counter example to my argument that information technology rarely provides a competitive edge anymore. Wal-Mart had famously set itself apart from its retailing rivals, IT analysts would point out, by building a lot of highly customized IT systems that its competitors were hard-pressed to match ... Now, with commodity software greatly advanced, Wal-Mart's custom systems have turned from advantage to disadvantage, and the IT analysts have changed their tune ... ' .