The New Polymath, my friend Vinnie Mirchandani’s new book is getting closer to the finish line. In the latest excerpt, he talks about the consumerization of technology and how it is impacting all our lives. It makes for thought provoking reading. A few snippets:

SOHO is no longer just a Manhattan neighborhood but a growing revenue category for technology companies as the acronym for small office, home office.

And they’re all (well almost all as far as I can tell) looking for technology that fits their needs, not that of others.

Some companies are trying the superficial—let’s “put a lipstick on the pig,” – change the user interface to look more “cool,” and use language and graphics in manuals younger employees can relate to.  That will not help with Mia Lindheimer, who knows treasure hunts are not for Easter alone. Since she was six she has been geocaching. In this game, people set up caches all over the world and share their locations on the Internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. How do you find more about the game? “Oh, just Google it,” she says to the annoyance of her father, who works at Microsoft and would rather she say “Bing it.”

Anyone want to name names?

Enterprises are gradually waking up to the fact there is no law precluding them from using products aimed at consumers themselves, sometimes at startling savings.

One word – -Google.

I encourage you to flip over to Vinnie’s place and catch the rest.

As an aside, I sometimes get emails asking me why I write about such apparently off beat topics. They remind us that the world we occupy is changing rapidly, that the clients we had yesterday won’t be the same ones we have tomorrow We need to adapt or perish.

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