In this paper we intend to motivate various research areas in configuration, based on our experience in developing commercial configuration solutions. Informal definitions are given for the configuration task and for configuration specification and description languages. We also offer an abstract characterization of the issue addressed in configuration models, most often represented as constraints or rules. With these definitions and examples of configuration problems from various domains, we motivate research in (1) a common ontology for configuration, (2) function representation and functional reasoning in configuration, and (3) scaling configuration to large problems.