In a speech at the 2006 MIT Emerging Technologies Conference, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, has pointed out that 70% of the time spent on a project is spent on inconsequential tasks that don't differentiate that project from any other. Bezos calls these features "muck" and suggests developers could outsource their implementation to third parties or technologies, much in the same way business owners outsource generic tasks like accounting, finance, and legal services.
In an overview for Artima Developer, Frank Sommers looks at Bezo's observations and suggests that Rails is an ideal tool for reducing the level of "muck" in a project, along with technologies such as Amazon's S3 storage API. With Jeff Bezos' recent investment in Rails-founders 37signals, a company that strongly believes in focusing on differentiation from competitors (mostly by providing a simple, user-friendly service) it seems Bezos is putting his money where his mouth is.