I think "crowdsourcing" is a bit of a flaky concept, really. You're not getting anything valuable from Average Joe, you're either getting a democratic assessment of something (ie, 1K Average Joes), which is nothing new, or you are tapping into the top 1% of a particular niche.
That being said, the concept of firing your employees to tap the crowd as an entity for free is completely flawed.
What I find more likely to happen is that the crowd, whether the 1% or the group as a whole will begin to understand the value they create and will start to charge for that value. If the business community wants to hasten that reaction by ensuring the crowd is as under-employed as possible, then so be it. This generation of workers has shown themselves to be much more adaptable than "super efficient" businesses ever were.
The thing about crowdsourcing in tech support is that the crowd is the one that's experienced the problem, and is practiced in using the solution. The thing that Brad Smith does not understand is that the technical support staff from Intuit play a different role in the ecosystem around his product than user experts; and removing the in-house tech staff would likely drive away the user experts.
I don't think the 'crowd' is going to wake up and start charging for things they currently do for free because the most effective forms of crowdsourcing depend on small individual contributions being given collective effectiveness by the context.
That being said, the concept of firing your employees to tap the crowd as an entity for free is completely flawed.
What I find more likely to happen is that the crowd, whether the 1% or the group as a whole will begin to understand the value they create and will start to charge for that value. If the business community wants to hasten that reaction by ensuring the crowd is as under-employed as possible, then so be it. This generation of workers has shown themselves to be much more adaptable than "super efficient" businesses ever were.