What happens after PCs are ubiquitous and people are no longer buying technology for more features, speed, or power? We buy lifestyle, according to this analysis from Kevin Werbach's Werblog.
Apple is becoming something much closer to Sony: an integrated digital media company. Sony sells computers, but no one would call Sony a PC company. What it does best is create unique platforms and experiences, then market the hell out of them. That describes the new Apple as well. The heart of the company is the digital lifestyle, not a box.
This perspective raises a question for corporations: What's the digital lifestyle mean at work? Will corporations continue to buy powerful, feature-laden enterprise systems or will we create new, lightweight distributed tools, like blogs and wikis, that help teams and organizations reach strategic goals?
Certainly the popularity of Instant Messaging is an example of lifestyle technology that has been brought into the workplace without the consent of the central IT staff. Blogs and wikis are seeing similar uptake for informal collaboration among teams. This trend is what's new: informal, edge, distributed, collaborative tools are creating a lifestyle approach to team work. They contrast with the traditional system approach represented by centralized software installations that impose behavioral and process requirements to fit the workers to the software.
