On the "end of the engineer"

After writing yesterday on science and engineering somebody attracted my attention to a (not new) very visible  posting by Tom Gillis on the Forbes Blog entitled: "The *End* of the engineer".    Gillis, who labels himself as an engineer who grew up in a family of engineers claims that in the past what the market competition was on better engineering and brings some examples of high-tech vendors who failed due to the fact that others succeeded to get better engineering.    The claim is that it is no longer the case, the differentiation is not in the engineering, but in understanding customers needs (even if the customers are not aware of them),  the ultimate example is the direction that Steve Jobs took Apple whose success was due to the market insights and not to superior engineering.    While engineers are still needed, Gillis claim that now they are not the one who will bring the crucial value, but those who can understand the customer's way of thinking, thus the heroes of the high-tech will be those who have "soft" skills, and the education system has to reflect it -- interesting perspective,  as you can imagine, also controversial, you can view the comments to the original Blog posting, some of them had strong opinions to either side (the author added prefix to the Blog in response)...   Not sure it is the end of engineering -- but I agree that the education for high-tech workers today is not technology only...