Retail Drives Enterprise

Welcome to my first post after leaving the position of Borland’s Chief Technology Officer. Assuming I haven’t been excised from the Borland site you can get a flavor of my thoughts about the tech industry and its impact on Borland’s business at http://blogs.borland.com/pjkerpan.

Why is it that retail technology from Best Buy or online sites is better than what many people have at work?

This is an effect that appeared to have begun in the early 90's. Sometime in the preceding years retail technology began to drive business technology, not the other way around. If there is a canonical example of the old model it is the facsimile machine. It wasn’t until enough businesses bought these that competition drove the price down into the range of the home office user.

Personal computers followed this arc until the early 90s. In the 91-ish timeframe I met with one of the heads of Hewlett Packard’s PC group with me bemoaning the poor design style of their product which we referred to as having a “babyshit brown design center”. We told them we would buy 4000+ Intel boxes if they could come up with some other color – to which the HP manager responded “But how would the users recognize they were computers?”

Since then the major PC vendors have continued the practice of having their “business computer” which is characterized by having lower performance and old components. In exchange for this a business is supposedly buying “stability”. Simultaneously of course the vendor is selling 10x of their retail/home/gaming computers. Buying the business computer is kind of like ordering the special stew at a restaurant – which is clearly made up of this week’s left over entrée ingredients.

So if there is a lesson to be drawn from today’s world is it “Businesses are stupid and consumers are smart”?

On the one hand consumer’s are ruthless adopters of technology to enable their personal lives; Fast PC’s, iPods, nearly free inkjet scanners/printers, photo printers, Tivos, xBoxes, Ultima Online, Ebay, Amazon, Gmail, etc.. They either have the wherewithal to go get Trillian or they just run 3 or 4 different IM’s – doesn’t matter. Alternatively, “business people” burn things off the asset register, use crummy computers handed down from R&D and Sales, to Marketing to G&A. To roll out a new software package takes anywhere from 1 to 3 years to install, migrate and train the users.

Meanwhile those same people go home and on the weekend switch photo sharing services, sell their “Hammer of Thor” in one online gaming environment for enough hard currency to buy the “Cerulean Plasma Rifle” in another, sell some things on Ebay, buy some things in zSHops, transfer their address book from Cingular to T-Mobile, and compare Orbitz, Priceline and Hotwire for vacation deals – personally besting most supercomputers at the traveling salesman problem.

What’s up with that?

The ease of access to information, the accessibility of new computing, networking and storage capabilities in the consumer market, the remote control and intelligent agency of Tivo, Orb Networks, Sling etc. will drive the business systems of tomorrow. Retail technology will continue to be the pace car in setting user expectations for their business capabilities.