Consumerization
Consumerization is an increasingly accepted term used to describe the growing tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business and government organizations. The emergence of consumer markets as the primary driver of information technology innovation is seen as a major IT industry shift, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development.
The term, consumerization, is believed to have been first used regularly in an IT industry context by Douglas Neal and John Taylor of the Leading Edge Forum in 2001. The first known published paper on this topic was the "Consumerization of Information Technology," published by the LEF in June 2004.[1]' The term is now used widely throughout the IT industry, and is the topic of numerous conferences and articles, most prominently thus far as a special insert in "The Economist" magazine in October 8, 2011.[2]
Historically, many technology-based products such as calculators, facsimile machines, and mobile phones, have also had their origins in business markets, and only over time become dominated by high volume consumer usage, as these products commoditized and prices fell. The technology behind the consumerization of computing can be said to have begun with the development of eight-bit, general-purpose microprocessors in the early 1970s and eventually the personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, it is significant that the great success of the IBM PC in the first half of the 1980s was driven primarily by business markets. Business preeminence continued during the late 1980s and early 1990s with the rise of the Microsoft Windows PC platform.
