Douglas Merrill, CIO of Google was quoted in the March 18, 2008 issue of the Wall Street Journal:
“Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That’s not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore [as they are in some consumer software].”
Consumer software, especially free to very low-cost online software such as Google Docs and Basecamp have leveled the playing field for small businesses. I can’t wait to see what’s next.