Trickle-Up Economics: How Consumers Turned Corporate Technology on its Head

Social Networking, Video, and the Internet
The impact of consumer-driven social networking sites and online communities is only beginning to make its presence felt in the corporate world. To grasp the significance of this trend, simply look at the global internet traffic ranking of these sites. According to web information company Alexa.com, Facebook ranks second, YouTube ranks fourth, MySpace ranks 12th, Twitter ranks 14th, and LinkedIn ranks 37th. Initially targeted at college students and youth markets, social networking sites have advanced beyond this demographic to include the mainstream adult population and Baby Boomer generation.

While social networking sites are still great places to link up with old friends and meet new ones, they also offer an expanding range of applications. Facebook’s applications, for example, include photo sharing, video sharing, recoding, messaging, groups, and events. The services and apps provided by the business-oriented site LinkedIn go even further. LinkedIn has built its platform with a modular architecture so third-party software companies can develop apps that plug right in. Some examples of its apps include presentation sharing (SlideShare), industry events, job searches, file sharing (Box.net), collaborative workspaces (Huddle.net), polls, and travel planning.

The profound success and capabilities of social networking sites such as YouTube and LinkedIn have not been lost on the corporate world. Enterprise software companies such as Microsoft, IBM Lotus Software, Google, and many others are scrambling to introduce some of these concepts and features into their corporate software platforms and portals. Some corporate portals with video content now have viewers’ rankings and comments, as YouTube does. Sales of Microsoft’s own enterprise collaboration platform, SharePoint, hit $1 billion in 2008, according to InformationWeek, and they are expected to climb steadily for the next several years. Microsoft and its partners are also enhancing SharePoint with an array of rich media, video, and social computing capabilities.

YouTube is going through the transformation from a popular but "lightweight" video sharing and entertainment site to a more serious educational and social marketing tool. In the enterprise, similar trends are occurring as businesses expand their use of video both internally and externally for a whole range of applications, including education, training, videoconferencing and telepresence, corporate communications, and marketing. In 2009, video in the enterprise was still a fragmented market, with numerous small to medium-sized vendors vying for their share of the bigger pot. As adoption rates grow and vendors make progress toward true, unified communications, we can expect to see fewer, more-dominant vendors. Boundaries between islands of video connectivity, such as streaming and videoconferencing, will also begin to disappear.

Consumer Impact and Benefits Continue
The prices for popular consumer products such as large-screen HD displays, PCs, laptops, video cameras, smartphones, and Wi-Fi networking gear continue to decline. Many of these same low-cost products can be used "as is" by business in a variety of diverse applications, including corporate communications, training and distance learning, digital signage, product development, and marketing. The once large gap between business and consumer products has narrowed to the point where individuals have access to almost the same leading-edge technology as businesses.

Not too long ago, the number of people working out of their homes represented a small fraction of our overall work force. They were often poorly equipped and poorly connected; a phone, a PC, and maybe a fax were their lifeline back to corporate headquarters. Of course, their email client software was different from corporate’s, their phones didn’t get business voice mail, and their PCs couldn’t connect to many corporate computing resources. Working from home was a bit like being a settler in the old Wild West; it took grit, resourcefulness, and rugged individualism to be successful.

Today, the business-consumer technology gap has narrowed to the point where there’s almost no difference between working in the office and working from home. Your office can be anywhere you want it to be: in your home office, on your deck, or in your car. Technical innovations in communications, videoconferencing, and collaboration, along with lower prices, will help remote workers and freelance contractors stay even more connected and in touch with their colleagues and peers.

So a word to the vendor community: When you start looking for your Next Big Idea, look no further than the purchases racked up at your local Best Buy for the shape of things to come.