Consumers ahead to stay

In the '90s and into the early part of this decade it was fair to assume that the enterprise (well the big ones anyway) had the better technology. You would expect to find the IT department bringing out the new gizmo's that really enabled you to do something more, better, faster, easier. Largely due to cost, but also because of the low penetration of fast, pervasive networks, the consumer market was some way behind.

The tables have turned. Mobile technology is giving people access to their personal emails and 'the cloud', but connectivity into the enterprise is lagging. People stream media around their house, have terabytes of storage at sub-£500 prices and are used to anywhere, any-device access to their data stored with online services such as Google Docs or Zimbra.

The expectation is that the enterprise should still be leading the charge, and I don't think that is possible anymore. The constraints for the enterprise are just so different. It doesn't matter if you stream a video into your home and your backup doesn't run, or it takes a bit longer for an email to arrive. In the enterprise that matter a huge amount, and we're serving the needs of thousands, not a handful. Although protecting personal data is important to everyone, your phone holds your data. The phone the company gives you holds data about clients, the company or its personnel, and management and security of these devices becomes a constraining factor.

We (the IT department) need to help bring the realisation to our customers in the business that you won't see it here first anymore; you'll buy it on the high street. We also need to help the leaders (who see the consumer technology as unnecessary toys) to see the value, when it's there, and to be courageous in bringing the right technologies and services into the enterprise.

The standard Microsoft stuff

My initial response on seeing the title and the link in the text to Google Gears was, "Oh no, here goes MS again making up their own thing while the rest of the industry tries to collaborate." But looking below that first flash scan this is clearly an evolution of a lot of work. I remember the SSE extensions to RSS being one of the new things to emerge when Ray Ozzie joined the company - hardly a surprise given his history sync back at Lotus.

I have to say this is a compelling bit of technology, but it scares me stupid. Doesn't anyone realise how disruptive P2P technologies are on the ability to do capacity/availability planning when they're brought in to the network. Where I work we have one P2P product that we use to distribute some large files. It works very well, but it can create some horrible storms. We have had to put in place seed machines in various locations.

» Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Microsoft posted for download on November 4 a first test build of what it’s calling the Microsoft Sync Framework, technology that will allow developers to take their Web services and databases offline.

UPDATE: Mary Jo-Foley just published another article that contains more details.