electric relaxation

Do advances in computing technology tend to show up in the consumer space first, or in a corporate environment? Or is there simply no correlation? I guess there are probably all sorts of measurement/range bias issues that render this an academically uninteresting line of inquiry, and perhaps even my bilateral classification system is naive and unrealistic (for example, perhaps I should be considering academia as a third distinct grouping).

I find it intriguing – and somewhat unsettling, since perhaps it indicates a personal rather than a communal shortcoming – that when I try to categorize a few big trends, I can’t definitively state or really even recall where some of them showed up first:

• Web Access – did more people first start browsing regularly at home, or in their offices?
• E-mail – Ok I’m fairly certain that this was much more prevalent in the workplace before making it into the home.
• Mobile messaging and Push E-mail – Were BlackBerry devices already prevalent in the enterprise before the SMS explosion? I would have guessed the former, but according to Wikipedia the average mobile user was sending 35 messages a month in 2000, while the first BlackBerry smartphone was released only in 2002 (though their original device was released in 1997. The NPT lawsuit debacle originated in 2000, which gels with my reollection, in that I’d heard of BlackBerry before graduating college, so I believe the pre-smartphone devices were already quite popular. Wikipedia does confirm that BlackBerry was the first major push e-mail service in the U.S. and it seems quite reasonable to use the BlackBerry as the barometer for the advent of this era in the corporate sector.
• Online video – I’m very uninformed about the use of digital video in business; I feel like it’s increasingly commonplace but I have no idea how mainstream it is – and I’m guessing that my work environment is quite atypical and therefore not a useful indicator. Nonetheless, I’m reasonably certain that movie piracy was the leading-edge of the trend, and that by and large, unidirectional streaming video is still largely a consumer-driven thing. Video conferencing meanwhile seems to be more evenly distributed, though it feels like it’s still a year or two away from being truly widespread.

Ok, so the reason I’m rambling about this is because it occurs to me that even assuming that the centralized SaaS-form of VDI makes any kind of sense as a way of doing computing, it’s still a toss-up as to whether it takes off at home or in the workplace first. Will VDI become mainstream before this Midori Cloud Computing platform from Microsoft shows up on a Dell machine?

I suppose an alternative outcome might be the emergence of a stable partition between consumer and business computing models, reflecting a fundamentally distinct ordering of priorities and acceptable tradeoffs between user experience, security, reliability and flexibility in these two domains – but I wouldn’t bet on it.