Does it seem to you that everyone and his brother wants to bring his own gear into the office now? You’ve got people wanting to bring their Apple iPads to work, users who want to use their iPhones or Android Droid 2s instead of their company-supplied Blackberries as their smartphone, and someone out there has surely tried to bring an Xbox 360 and Kinect to work for … uh … three-dimensional motion analysis? Yeah! That’s the ticket!
OK, so maybe no one has tried, successfully, to get an Xbox and Kinect into the office, but people are always trying to bring their tech toys to work. As Patrick Thibodeau tweeted from this year’s Computerworld Premier 100 conference, “CIOs who don’t support employee-owned devices, smartphones, iPads, etc., may be a minority: i.e. dinosaurs.”
This isn’t just talk. According to Nielsen’s latest smartphone market research, RIM is currently in a marketing-share dead heat with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but it’s losing ground. Forty-three percent of recent smartphone buyers purchased an Android device, compared to 26% for Apple iOS and 20% for RIM’s Blackberry.
Of course, some companies, such as Wells Fargo, just say no to all personal phones and tablets. They seem to be in the minority, though.