When social eliminates the need for IT services
Ten years ago, if you wanted to operate in a groupware environment you needed a beefy Internet connection, expensive hardware, team of people to maintain it and lots of expensive training or software. The need to collaborate securely created a huge boom in demand for IT personnel and made IT among the most powerful department in a typical corporation. Today, social is replacing even the most ambitious of corporate IT solutions and may ultimately be the tombstone to the idea of Unified Communications.
As large software and hardware manufacturers fight over the standard and effective way to build a mobile, audio, video and collaboration solution – Google and Facebook are providing it for free. To anyone.
Google is providing all it’s users free video conferencing – works with nearly every PC with a webcam. You can even broadcast your Google+ Hangout meetings live. For those of us that used computers for more than a year, that translates to live webinars.
Facebook is now offering file sharing too through it’s groups. You can upload anything except music or executables and again, in the not-so-Web2.0 words: this is your file server in the cloud.
Google and Facebook are connecting the dots from the old world of IT as a service to the new social world of IT as.. background noise.
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