"Freemium First Enterprise Second" Renaissance and the Mozart style of innovation

The BlackBerry (it sounds like the past, isn't it?) brought the Smart Phone to the Enterprise, while the cool iPhone introduced the Bring-Your-Own-Device culture to the enterprise.

The iPhone with its app store, the open source movement and the web 2.0 ushered in the prosumer culture, which blurred the producer/consumer distinction.

The resultant Long Tail of Applications caused people to Bring-Your-Own-Technology (BYOT) to the office.

As applications move from the data center to the Cloud, the power is shifting from the IT department to the user and the power-hungry users, are now boldly ignoring apps from large corporations and are embracing whichever satisfies their unique needs. 

As the freemium-first-enterprise-second trend is becoming pronounced, (note:the rush of acquisitions by Salesforce.com), innovators need to move from the Beethoven style of innovation into the Mozart style of innovation.

Listen to the Late Dijkstra talk passionately about Mozart

Skim, Slice and Dice to slay Information Overload

Q: If a baseball and bat cost $110, and the bat costs $100 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

If you answered $10, you just realized that your intuition could let you down or you need to go back to Elementary School.

 If you answered $5, you probably quickly guessed an answer and then tested it and iterated until the solution was consistent or you used what you learnt in Elementary School.

 The point is, you could start off thinking with your 'right-brain' and then test it with your 'left-brain'. Or using Daniel Kahneman's terms, combining System 1 with System 2 thinking.

 I suspect that, with the information overload, the optimal strategy in most contexts, would be to provide tools, so that, employees could 'efficiently' skim the page, in order to speed read documents, slice conference calls into segments, so that, they could quickly refer back to what was discussed, without losing the 'impact' and dice the email, so that your employees get off the email world and do work.