|
Consumerization is the reorientation of product and service designs to focus on (and market to) the end user as an individual consumer, in contrast with an earlier era of only organization-oriented offerings (designed solely for business-to-business or business-to-government sales). The emergence of the individual consumer as the primary driver of product and service design is most commonly associated with the IT industry, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development. Thus the microcomputer revolution, in which electronic computing moved from exclusively enterprise and government use to include personal computing, is the cardinal example of consumerization. But many technology-based products, such as calculators and mobile phones, have also had their origins in business markets, and only over time did they become dominated by high-volume consumer usage, as these products commoditized and prices fell. Both hardware and software may be consumerized; an example of enterprise software that became consumer software is optical character recognition software, which originated with banks and postal systems (to automate cheque clearing and mail sorting) but eventually became personal productivity software. The dissemination of technological change throughout an economy, at least for some technologies, thus moves from research and development (in which technologies are invented) through commercialization (in which they enter the business world) to consumerization. Consumerization can even happen to health care. In the 2010s, U.S. health care has been going through a consumerization process known as a "retail revolution", an advent of retail price sensitivity and urgent care availability that was formerly absent. Patients with high deductibles, used to other industries having accurate price tags or at least estimates, increasingly expect them in health care as well. ==Origins== Although consumerization has existed for decades, the term ''consumerization'' as a name for the phenomenon is believed to have been first used regularly in an IT industry context by Douglas Neal and John Taylor of the Leading Edge Forum in 2001. The first known published paper on this topic was the "Consumerization of Information Technology," published by the LEF in June 2004.〔David Moschella, Doug Neal, John Taylor and Piet Opperman ''Consumerization of Information Technology''. Leading Edge Forum, 2004, http://lef.csc.com/projects/70, Accessed 27/02/2012〕' The term is now used widely throughout the IT industry, and is the topic of numerous conferences and articles, most prominently thus far as a special insert in "The Economist" magazine in October 8, 2011.〔Special Report: Personal Technology, "Consumerisation: The Power of Many", Economist, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21530921, Accessed 27/02/2012〕 The technology behind the consumerization of computing can be said to have begun with the development of eight-bit, general-purpose microprocessors in the early 1970s and eventually the personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thus the microcomputer revolution, in which electronic computing moved from exclusively enterprise and government use to include personal computing, is the cardinal example of consumerization. However, it is significant that the great success of the IBM PC in the first half of the 1980s was driven primarily by business markets. Business preeminence continued during the late 1980s and early 1990s with the rise of the Microsoft Windows PC platform. Meanwhile, other technology-based products, such as calculators, fax machines, and mobile phones, also had their origins in business markets, and only over time did they become dominated by high-volume consumer usage, as these products commoditized and prices fell. It was the growth of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s that began to reverse this pattern. In particular the rise of free, advertising-based services such as email and search from companies such as Hotmail and Yahoo began to establish the idea that consumer IT offerings based on a simple Internet browser were often viable alternatives to traditional business computing approaches. In recent years, this view has become increasingly accepted due to the widespread reliance on free, advertising-based services from a growing number of firms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Consumerization」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|