The Con-sumerization of technology

So on flights this weekend I took along paperwork. A stack of holiday cards to write. And some expense receipts to process.

I checked for my flights on-line. I had my GPS on each flight to track our progress. And each stop I checked FlightAware to see where the in-bound flight was . I checked Weather.com to see en route  clouds.  I had my headphones on during each flight. I barely said anything to the attendants or ground staff. I had everything I needed.

Actually the staff were a bit annoying. One in particular checked every 15 minutes on my stack of greeting cards to see if I was making progress. Another told me twice - no working on weekends. Another was curious about my GPS.  And I was like - I don't need them. With all the technology in my hands I could run this airline myself. Yea, right...

And it hit me how smug all these consumer technologies have made us. We forget the folks who operate our satellites. Run the mainframes that churn our weather calculations. Run the reservations for our airlines. Run the production processes at the music studios which bring us our MP3. The enterprise stuff which does the heavy lifting so us consumers feel empowered.

Yes, today's debate about sexiness in consumer versus enterprise technologies brought that out even more. We can call enterprise technology dull and boring and  un-sexy, but the con is on us consumers if we actually believe our our iPhones, and amazon.com and our HDTVs and web services have made us hot technologists....

Update: IT World Canada on the growing issue with users who consider themselves "tech savvy". Reader Julien points to a good example of a iPhone toting, "tech savvy" passenger and the way the pilots dealt with him...