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Last night on my subway commute home I saw for the first time 2 people sitting next to each other with ereader devices. I realize they’ve been around for years, but perhaps we are technology lagers in Canada, or maybe our government over-regulated that particular product segment because of the potential impact to domestic beer or potash values. Whatever the case I hadn’t, until very recently, seen a lot of ereaders on the subway.

Seeing not just one but TWO e-ink devices in the hands of my fellow subway riders made me realize that:

a) there may be something to those gizmos, and
b) the way that we see technology and how it fits in to our lives has changed

Technology used to be incredibly intimidating. My mother still refuses to watch a dvd on her own for fear of breaking something. For her, technology has always been the realm of computer scientists and engineers. Those gadgets weren’t made for her in mind, so she didn’t spend much time with them.

On the other hand for those of us who grew up with technology, we managed to learn all the commands, and in some cases the code it takes to do things. We built up a tolerance for the user experience shortfalls that plagued our gizmos and gadgets. My first computer was a Commodore 64, and I give products a lot of slack when it comes to user experience. For me, the mere existence of a mouse is a godsend compared to where I started.

But the world has changed. This is what I saw on the subway. Normal people who aren’t computer scientists now demand more, they want technology to not only solve a problem but actually enhance their lives. They want things that work, and they want them to work the way they expect them to.

Why can’t enterprise solutions be this easy?

Take disaster recovery as an example. Load up the tape drives, configure the backups, and manage the logistics of the backup archives. This doesn’t even take in to account the complexity associated with actually failing over a backup, or performing any tests.

These mundane tasks along with others that administrators face day in and day out need to be less time consuming, and more intuitive. Enterprises can’t simply be satisfied with the quirks and pains of yesterday’s technology solutions. The next big products in the datacenter will need to just work, work well, and be easy to understand. A few years ago people would have thought that would be impossible. But there are now a slew of consumer level products that would beg to differ…

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.