Last Week’s Economist issue contained a series of articles on how technological innovation has shifted towards consumer technology. The argument generally was, that in the past innovation at the consumer space always lagged technological innovation at the government and military spaces. But that might be changing and might have already done so. Amazon offered cloud computing to customers before companies started targeting enterprises and governments. Similarly, the latest smartphones lead in terms of technology compared to smartphones prevalent at large enterprises and governments (Blackberry anyone?). Today I came across this article at Fast Company that lays out the “War” leading technology companies will be engaging in to make significant inroads into the consumer space. Conspicuously absent from this list are companies that focus on large enterprises like IBM, HP, Dell and even traditionally consumer oriented companies like Dell.
I’m personally excited by the focus on the consumer, as by putting more powerful technology at the hands of the consumer countries may become more productive.
