Steve Jobs and Apple –The Pioneers of Consumerisation?

As I sit here eagerly for the last 2 hours or so downloading the latest iteration of Apples operating system; iOS 5  (which by the way is telling me has over 1 hour to wait) I got to thinking surely the movement of consumerisation is largely an offshoot of the innovation that Steve Jobs and Apple crave on.  Whether or not it was intentional is another discussion, but nonetheless the iPAD represents a desirable device that has found its way into many enterprises and will continue to do so.

First was the iPod (That’s next on my upgrade).  Which proved massively popular and then went off the scale with a clever port of iTunes onto Windows desktops and the millions of users who could access the service. The natural extension of this was the iPhone (That is after the iPOD upgrade), which only had an app store developed for it in 2008!  Once it became apparent the reach that the App Store would have every mainstream vendor clamored to get their applications to the masses.  More interestingly the more nimble organisations found ways to get their innovative cloud applications to the consumer and hence into businesses such as Dropbox, Box.net and Evernote.

After the iPhone came the iPAD, a natural branch of a fantastically successful phone but in a slightly larger form factor.  Suddenly the execs of the business were entering the business with tablet devices asking how they get them on the network, why won’t our productivity applications work with it and why is the wireless not in the right areas.  This brought about a whole project in systems integration.

I come back to my original question – was this a planned shift in workforce devices?  I doubt it, but it has happened.  And the fact that my download of iOS 5 is still saying one hour remaining tells me that the world of business is going to have a whole new set of capabilities tomorrow morning in the office.

Equanet are experts in tablet deployment, integration and strategy.  We can help you develop your vision, deploy that vision and manage that vision.  Interested in seeing how tablets can impact your business, then contact us.

Oh, and I now have 45 mins left…..