Sunday, September 22, 2013

What killed Blackberry?  The funny little Blackberry was, just a few years ago, the standard office worker's accessory.  So why did the iPhone and Android devices wipe out the Blackberry so easily?  It's actually very simple: Blackberry devices were purchased by companies, and iPhones and Androids were (at least at first) purchased by individuals.  Corporate IT departments are learning how to integrate individually owned devices into corporate IT systems, and this has forced enormous changes into all sorts of things.  ServiceNow, a company I used to work for, leverages this new “bring your own device” by being web-based and fostering iPhone and Android apps; many other IT vendors are doing the same thing.  Larger corporate IT shops are producing internal iPhone and Android apps that only work within their corporate networks.  All of this is a huge change from the way Blackberry worked, and it accelerates the broader trend in corporate IT environments from more-or-less homogenous worlds to unabashedly heterogeneous worlds.  At the executive level within these companies, it's very clear that the heterogeneous world is a big win.  The stodgier IT community isn't so sure – but, like the buggy-whip makers, they won't be around for too much longer...

There are some parallels that could be drawn between this phenomenon and the immigration issue :)

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