One of the topics that came up during our Locknote session at Enterprise Connect in Orlando last month--and a concern you often hear--had to do with why innovation has happened so much faster in the consumer world than in the enterprise. A related issue is whether we'll ever seen a slowdown in the pace at which end users can trump enterprise-driven technology adoption with their consumer devices and services.
The two questions are obviously related, but I think there's a somewhat different answer to each. Let me take the latter one first.
There is no reason to believe consumer-level adoption of technology will ever slow to the pace of the enterprise. This is not the enterprise's fault. A consumer can decide to blow his or her money on anything they want to, whenever they want to. They may face some financial constraints, but they also have a fair amount of leeway to ignore those constraints, at least for some period of time, until the credit card companies lose patience with them.
Enterprises don't have this luxury and they shouldn't. People who work for enterprises share in the enterprise's fiduciary duty to the owners or stakeholders; they just can't go spending money on every new thing that comes along. There is no such thing as "impulse buying" in an enterprise.
The only reason you even have to point this out nowadays is because computer-related products have become such a big chunk of the consumer electronics industry. Back in the days when consumers blew their money on expensive TV sets, hi-fi systems, and early generations of video games, there was no danger of BYOD. You couldn't B those Ds of YO.
Nowadays a consumer might still blow a fair amount of money on a plasma TV, but chances are they'll spend more, over the lifespan of that TV, on consumer electronics that can be BYOD--smartphones, laptops, tablets, and various over-the-top applications and services running on those devices.
So let's forget about the idea that, because people bring their own devices, that means the enterprise must be doing something wrong. We're not.
The other point from the Locknote, however, does center around something the enterprise could at least be doing better: Creating innovative applications and services that solve business problems as compellingly in users' work lives as they find Angry Birds or Pinterest in their personal lives. That's something we can exercise some control over, and can do better. And users will respond. People will be more than happy to fall in love with a work tool that makes their job easier or makes them look better to their bosses.
And I agree with the several people on our Locknote panel who suggested that the pace of meaningful innovation seems to be slowing down in the consumer world. I think that's part (not all, but part), of what's driving Facebook's destined-to-fail Home platform. Facebook today is like Microsoft Word of several generations ago: What's cool about it is the original, basic functionality--WYSIWYG text, or connecting with friends. Every new release from there on is really bloatware--an "upgrade" whose addition is meant to serve the vendor's ends, not yours. In his most recent blog, Zeus talks about this idea and offers a good summary of why nobody really needs Facebook Home--and why you wouldn't want it.
Another really great point that Zeus makes is that the one type of innovation that really would be useful for Facebook is some kind of meaningful communications integration that would let you talk/video chat with your friends in real time. Maybe WebRTC will help this along.
But I suspect that Facebook sees such incremental upgrades as small-ball, in a world where the Giants of the Internet--Facebook, Google, Microsoft--are really only interested in big moves. (More accurately, as Russell Bennett points out, their stockholders are focused thusly.) So Facebook has to make a big play, like trying to take over your whole mobile phone.
At this point, then, enterprises are actually better-positioned to be entrepreneurial than the big consumer Web players are. You can't stop BYOD (and you wouldn't want to)--but you can start bringing a level of innovation to the enterprise that has, up to now, been limited to the consumer world.
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