Consumers drive tech

I'm not sure when it happened, but some time in the past few years consumers have become the drivers for technology.

In the "good old days", technology such as recording equipment, communication gear, and computing machinery followed a specific path. First, government adopted equipment (and possibly funded the research), then corporations adopted it, and finally consumers used watered-down versions of the equipment. Computers certainly followed this path. (All computers, not just microcomputers or PC variants.)

The result was that government and large corporations had a fairly big say in the design and cost of equipment. When IBM was selling mainframes to big companies (and before they sold PCs), they would have to respond to the needs of the market. (Yes, IBM was a bit of a monopoly and had market power, so they could decide some things.) But the end result was that equipment was designed for large organizations, with diminutive PCs being introduced after the "big" equipment. Since the PCs came later, they had to play with the standards set by the big equipment: PC screens followed the 3270 convention of 25 lines and 80 characters, the original discs for CP/M were IBM 3740 compatible, and the original PC keyboard was left-over parts from the IBM System/23. CP/M took its design from DEC's RT-11 and RSX-11 operating systems, and PC-DOS was a clone of CP/M.

But the world has changed. In the twenty-first century, consumers decide the equipment design. Cell phones, internet tablets, and iPhones are designed and marketed to individuals, not companies. (The one exception is possibly the Blackberry devices, which are designed to integrate into the corporate environment.)

The typical PC purchased for home use is more powerful that the typical corporate PC. I myself saw this effect when I purchased a laptop PC. It had a faster processor, more memory, and a bigger screen than my corporate-issued desktop PC. And it stayed in front for several years. Eventually an upgrade at the office surpassed my home PC... but it took a while.

Corporations are buying the bargain equipment, and consumers are buying the premium stuff. But it's more than hardware.

Individuals are using software, specifically social networking and web applications, much faster than companies and government agencies. If you consider Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr, and LiveJournal, it is clear that the major design efforts are for the consumer market. People use these applications and companies do not. The common office story is often about the new hire just out of college, who looks around and declares the office to be medieval, since corporate policies prevent him from checking his personal e-mail or using Twitter.

With consumers in the driver's seat, corporations now have to use equipment that is first designed for people and somehow tame it for corporate use. They tamed PCs, but that was an easy task since PCs were derived from the bigger equipment. New items like iPhones have always been designed for consumers; integrating them will be much harder.

And there's more. With consumers getting the best and corporations using the bargain equipment, individuals will have an edge. Smaller companies (say, two guys in a garage) will have the better equipment. They've always been able to move faster; now they will have two advantages. I predict that smaller, nimbler companies will arise and challenge the existing companies.

OK, that's always happening. No surprise there. I think there will be more challengers than before.