The Enterprise Consumer Great Wall Meltdown

Image via CrunchBaseSteve Jobs, that most iconic of tech CEOs, absolutely has refused to take his eyes off the consumer to offer something also to the enterprise, and that has been his Apple story from the beginning. And he is winning. The iPad has been flooding the workplace. What is good for the consumer is also good for enterprise.

Mark Zuckerberg absolutely refused to let people have more than one identity when all the talk was that you are one person to your boss, another person to your college friend. He argued it should not be that way. You ought be the same person to everyone.

Could Skype Be Microsoft's YouTube?

Gmail is another example. It is good enough for the informal individual, it is good enough for the knowledge worker.

Skype, that has been hogging the news as of late, falls in that same category. A flagship consumer product has just been bought by the ultimate workplace software company.

ReadWriteWeb: 5 Reasons Why Skype Will Be an Office Hit: The new generation of great enterprise services have a common thread. People use them all the time. An iPhone is for work and for play. People use GMail in both their personal and work lives, too. Skype is in that same category. You may use it one day to call your Mom and the next minute to chat with a colleague. We named Skype our enterprise conferencing tool of the year in 2010 for its moves towards providing business-grade communications with the ease of use of its consumer product...... Combined, Microsoft has invested about $9.5 billion this past year in communications through its partnership with Nokia for $1 billion and the $8.5 billion Skype deal. What that means is millions of smartphones with VOIP. ...... The idea of the fully immersive video experience begins to become reality with Skype in the play. Combine it with Kinect and you have the makings of an immersive video experience that is far more natural than the desktop model that has been popularized over the last 10 years.

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