A young girl, Arfa Karim Randhawa, only 9 years old, passed Microsoft certification exams and became the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (although it seems that Bangalorean S. Chandrasekhar did the same thing). They are great kids and I am not going to suppose that every kid could do that.
It means that those little guys could do things that were reserved to professionals twenty years ago and that people like them could become architects or doctors, but, in their spear time, could improve the Linux kernel or even write new software, invent, create. That puts a new light on the software as value. I believe software would become cheaper, if not free.
There are also some side effects.
As Garner studies already show, IT is not the source for new jobs, and CS PhD should not be something a young man today would want. Future for those who already write software might sound as EA spouse describe it, a long march leading the coder to physical exhaustion because of their low-value work.
It also means that software becomes less important when compared with content. If you’re a biochemist and you write software like Reactome, you would never expect to receive money for the thousands of Perl code lines, but you might very well get paid for the data Reactome uses.
It also means that instead of posting on Rent-A-Coder, you’d better search for the job already done on Sourceforge or Freshmeat. And it also means that those guys lying to their wives or parents about how hard is to become a Microsoft-certified-Robby-the-Robot-clicking-Next-on-friendly-wizards, should stop right now and get a real job.