Consumerisation: coming to a business near you…
And the IT vendors know this: that's one of the reasons they've been pushing ever lower-priced, higher-performance and feature-rich devices to consumers over the past couple of years.
The rationale is simple: if users can now afford fast notebooks with big screens, multimedia and an array of attractive applications – not to mention 3G and other fast (and now inexpensive) Internet services at home – they'll no longer settle for using the technology the company deems "appropriate" for their jobs.
If they have a 5MB email attachment limit on their work email accounts, they'll simply give out their gmail address (which has a 20MB attachment limit) to get that large spreadsheet or presentation emailed to them.
This trend isn't going away. In fact, it's becoming even stronger. On two separate trips to Silicon Valley over the past month, two IT vendors in two separate areas of focus cited the consumer market as a major driver for the technologies and products they bring to market in the business space.
In early June, Cisco spoke to me at length about how Web 2.0 (such as Google, Facebook, Flickr, Digg.com and YouTube) is filtering into the business space. And then, late in June, Intel explained how the company is taking the lead from gamers and game developers when it comes to delivering ever-faster processors. The company also recently embraced blogging and is encouraging its researchers to share their findings online.
Where this ends is anyone's guess…
Loading ...