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Consumer Technologies Adopted by Corporates

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

It is the end of the year. We all love the end of the year. It isn't just the incessant parties or the celebrations; we do celebrate the true meaning of festivals through copious amounts of eggnog. You will see us frantically waiving complex algorithms at each other, analysing and comparing technologies for you because that's what we, at PCQuest, love to do. When on an eggnog fuelled night, we argued with our laid back cousin-LD2.in-who can hold his drink, we conceded that technologies that the corporates picked up were originally focussed primarily for the consumer audience. We fought for you, dear reader, but LD2.in forced our hand.

We decided to list out the arguments for you. Here are the five consumer technologies that were designed for consumer consumption but were adopted with equal ferocity by the business user.

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Compact disks

The compact disk was catered to the traditionalists. When cassettes replaced vinyl, several music companies refused to admit that vinyls would ever be forgotten. But cassettes did, compact disks were a return to the vinyl. Music could be written on a higher definition on the discs and the space increased. The business user was still struggling with 3 MB floppy disks. The shift to disks of a higher capacity-700 MB, brought along a new generation of external data storage. It was picked up to back up software when companies started releasing their software in an array of disks. DVDs too were adopted due to their high volume storage capacity. The progression was supposed to graduate to flash drives but with the telecom boom, the focus is now on the Internet and P2P sharing.

Instant messengers

We all remember the days of 'ASL,' the original form of social networking. The IM was one of the biggest reasons consumers took to the Internet. Furiously typing, setting up their own dictionary full of words abbreviated to a form that has been carried into regular non-IM conversation. ICQ was one of the favourites then. IM was simple, it did not need a high bandwidth, simple messages could be exchanged and it was free. Corporates adopted it as their unified communications network. It made conversation quicker and more than just text could be exchanged. It became a replacement for file transfer programmes. Now, IMing can make video as well as voice calls. The bandwidth gets cheaper and so do ways of communication. Instant Messengers are here to stay.

Flash memory



DVDs drew a line, they became tiresome to carry and store. Flash drives was briefly the way to carry music on; they could be erased and re-written on. They could be used a larger number of times than a CD or even a DVD. It was easier to write on them and were portable. The corporates love portable solutions. The laptop was a corporate need rather than a general transition to a smaller, lighter form of computing. The flash drives have since grown smaller in size and bigger in storage volume. There has been talk of flash drives replacing traditional hard disks, so wait for the new year to see what unfolds.

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Google Apps

We are fans of Google. It is our primary search provider. We do use Wolfram Alpha as well but Google it is. When Google introduced the labs, we had them switched on. We tinkered. Our emails were multi-coloured; we stuck fancy labels on the editor's emails. We even played with the location of the chat interface. When Google combined two of our favourite things-Open Source and on the cloud, we loved it. Google Docs took off, and several organizations adopted it. Everyone had a copy of the most important data floating within their docs. Market plans were shared on the spreadsheet within the Google interface. Google allows you to collate calendar entries. Gmail allows you to sync your Gmail account with Outlook. Google Apps had security baked in, which increased scalability.

iPhone

iPhone when launched was for the rich and famous. There were famous queues stretching across blocks to buy the iPhone, marriages were ruined. It was a traumatic time. The App store served up wonderful flavours of games and maps. The iPhone was the quintessential consumer device and all of this in 2007. Over the last year, the business user has picked it up. Its touch interface has been user friendly, despite its faults; the iPhone has been able to cater to the business market by being able to showcase its apps market. A technology head of an Indian touch-screen manufacturer said, “As the sales increase the price drops.” iPhones became cheaper and the demand increased. Corporates needed the iPhone to let their management connect with them on the go. It increased productivity and did not let off the style statement. The Blackberry has beaten the iPhone in the race to dominate the Indian corporate world, but worldwide, it's been seriously considered be even leading financial institutes as a serious business tool on the move.

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