The Consumerization of Technology

I heard the divisional CIO of a global company use that phrase a couple of weeks ago while the topic of Best Buy's Geek Squad came up as a potential remote employee desktop support vendor.  I filed away the phrase.

Phil's post about network backup at Starbucks brought it back.

While the rage is about how consumer oriented technologies and web 2.0 will affect the enterprise, I find it just as interesting how supposedly consumer oriented outlets are affecting enterprises:

CompUSA as a NetSuite SaaS dealer
Staples selling procurement BPO services
amazon as a utility computing provider
Kinkos as a document management BPO solution
ebay with Skype as a telecom provider

Are there security, scalability, service level issues with each? Sure, but for many small businesses, mobile and remote employees of large companies they represent an increasingly viable choice...