Team forming is itself a big cost
One thing that often gets minimized or overlooked is that team forming is itself a major cost in any kind of knowledge work. There's also the soft stuff about adjusting to each others' personal styles and quirks, discovering each others' strengths and weaknesses, negotiating the division of work, ... In brief, the less the work is sharply defined, easily partitioned and clearly delimited, the harder it is to just bring a team of strangers together and allocate tasks to them.
This is why even in modern Hollywood, the ultimate "contractor market", you often find the same group of people -- director, actor, cinematographer, set designer, ... -- working together. And even in more prosaic fields such as construction, you find that people prefer to work as a crew with familiar people, even if the each have their own unique fields.
In other words, TechCrunch's thesis is the kind of thing that is most appealing to somebody who thinks that people are essentially like soft, squishy Web services that you can call for transactions whenever you need one.