A new business model is emerging, and it depends heavily on software development. Many companies are dropping many of the traditional barriers between product development and customers. Without investing in software development, these efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, will have a better chance of failing than succeeding. 

The simplest term I can concoct for this business model is "the transparent company." There are other defining characteristics of this corporate strategy, such as confidence in the ability to execute, and a very different sort of relationship with customers. However, as companies have been decidedly opaque to their customers, any transparency is a striking detail in itself. Hence the term "transparent company."

Wave Hello To The Engineer Fixing Your Bug 
Here's an example of what I mean. I don't have to be a customer of Atlassian to know what issues Atlassian's engineers will fix in the next release of their wiki product, Confluence. That information is publicly available at this link. Diving into an issue at random — I chose "Database deadlock during initialisation of plugins in sql server" because it sounded fairly dire — I can see which engineer is working on this issue, Don Willis. I can even see the daily activity stream for Don Willis as he works on this issue and other projects.