The Arbitrage from Consumerization

Remember in the 90s when companies started wising up to airlines subsidizing the casual traveler and soaking the business traveler? In recent months I have started to hear murmurs from CIOs they are tired of similarly "subsidizing" consumer technology.

Some examples:

• You and I can buy off some sites Microsoft Office 2007 Standard for $ 169.99 (you can do even better if you are a student or in academia). That gets you core Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint functionality. But its channel will sell the Professional version(which has additional components like Access which few companies leverage) and related maintenance to many businesses  at several times that cost.
• Many mobile phone carriers are offering consumers unlimited voice plans.Sprint is even offering a $ 99.99 plan which covers unlimited voice, data, text, GPS and more.  Most corporate plans today do not have unlimited anything.
• Many companies pay $ 2 to 4 a gb a month in storage to outsourcers. You and I can buy outright 1 terabyte of storage for under $ 500, and storage in the cloud for under 25c a gb a month.
• Many companies outsource their deskside support (break/fix and other issues). That's convenient particularly for remote and work-at-home employees. But some companies are finding that instead of paying for annual coverage, it is a lot cheaper to just pay as you go by using something like BestBuy's Geek Squad. Most outsourcers end up sub-contracting the work to local service providers themselves, so the difference in quality of service is often not as noticeable.

As with consumer airfares, there will be "Saturday night stay" and other silly restrictions, but the savings will make more CIOs look at "consumer" packaging - or at least using those benchmarks when negotiating enterprise deals.