Are you Consumerized?

If you are a recent MBA grad in India , you must be enjoying the current very-soon-to-be-over-post-college-pre-job period? Eagerly waiting for that first day on job?And for that office laptop? What if it turns out to be one black, heavy, bulky and ugly box? Will you still use it? Atleast in Office? (assuming you won't be able to flaunt it the way you used to flaunt your now-soon-to-be-ex (laptop? Ofcourse not? Oh those happy days!)).

Most of the time , you will use your office laptop as your own property (read - for your own personal work/surf/entertainment). In reality , you no more will get just any ugly box; even your employer understands you want it your way. The time has come when you , the end user , can influence the devices/tools/machines to be used and not your company. So if you are comfortable with an OpenOffice , noone will force you to open your docs in MS-Word. Isn't it?

Now what should a Toshiba or a Dell or an HP or an Apple Team should build - That sleek one (Sony Viao even has a size zero one!), the designer colored one , having high-end graphics card for you to play around(games of course) and a webcam to make those necessary skype calls (assumption applied: the now-soon-to-be-ex theory failing) OR/AND those bulky powerful one for enterprise usage(yes they are customized to have higher processing power, speed, memory, configuration and what not). At Dell, the same development team takes care of both small business & consumer. Many vendors are offering enterprise products with look-and-feel of consumer products. The number of SMBs buying PCs from retail or online outlets is increasing with an overall decrease in the purchase from dealer market.

So what's happening?

The line between consumer and enterprise technology/product demand is slowly getting blurred. The new gen Enterprise 2.0 workforce is hard-wired for specific technology/product/features/facility and the companies that overlook it can face a loss of competitive advantage in the labor market. Would you like to work in a company which don't allow the Facebook access to its employees? Social media/Networking  has improved our personal lives, why not use it to improve our corporate lives as well?

The toy is becoming tool? or its the other way around (does your child prefer an internet connection to a licence to an outdoor game?)

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(PS: I still love my college laptop. Not because of the Toshiba label it carries but more because it has all the tools in the world installed , all the bookmarks , those read later, those add-ins which can make me the most successful and most efficient human being on any day at any place.)