This is one part of the developer community that doesn't get publicized as much. The Startup web companies are not the only place where developers work, but they are the most competitive. I work for an Assessor's office as a developer, and we develop our management information system in house. There are only about 7 developers that know how it works, and each one is specialized in certain areas of it. There is no way that someone could come in and replace us without spending years working with the software first. There is no out of box program that could take the place of this specialized and customized software. And even if there was a company this department could out source too, they would not get bug fixes and new builds as fast as they do now.
Also, in this scenario, I would hate to be one of the employees who uses the software, because it is very complicated, and for them to have to ability to meat with the development team face to face for training, feature requests, or bug reports is very beneficial. But, it is unfortunate that some companies often don't see the benefit of having good in house IT professionals and developers, at least when they are looking for more ways to please stakeholders.
1. The author points out all of the services which now exist, but says nothing of people and talent it takes to create and support such services. I think the tail for 'software enabled services' is rather longer than factory automation robots.
2. The author seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what developers actually do these days. Yes, it is true that people are not typically employed to roll their own e-commerce or blog sites. Very few people are doing this nowadays. Most of the software getting written for business today is highly specialized. Highly specialized software = no out of the box solution.
3. The author ignores the fact that a major drop in demand for software talent would probably coincide with some revolutionary change in technology. I'm talking about ubiquitous self driving cars and planes, robots that teach themselves, ad-hoc on site manufacturing via 3d printing, software that writes itself, etc. Should any of those things come to pass, having a nice job as a developer will be the least of anybody's worries.
While I do agree that the industry is changing, I really don't see it as being that similar to the auto industry melt down. The differences and flaws in such an analogy are easily spotted.