Is there still a difference between business and consumer software? Google Inc.’s Eric Schmidt said “no” this week during a conference presentation in San Francisco.

“What I hope will happen is that this artificial distinction of consumers and businesses will go away,” Schmidt said.

The story in Geekwire also quotes Schmidt talking about an end to enterprise software, which I think is a bit of a stretch, even if I agree with his basic premise.

“Talk to a consumer,” Google’s executive chairman said. “The consumer wants just as much security as the enterprise.”

In that sense, enterprise may be dead. Yet there are still applications that only enterprises will use and/or provide functionality well beyond what consumers need. Yes, the user experience for these applications will be informed by consumer apps, but that doesn’t make them consumer applications.

I’d pencil a line between apps primarily used by individuals to meet their needs, whether business or personal, as being a consumer applications.  Across that line are apps primarily used by groups or for tasks which provide little or no personal benefit that I’d still call “enterprise.”

That means I consider Microsoft SharePoint to be an enterprise app, Visio is a businessy consumer app, Office is a consumer suite… See how murky this gets?

It’s a lifestyle thing

Part of what Schmidt describes is that consumer and business software folded together as our work lives and personal lives have became so tightly coupled that it can be hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

That our software comes to reflect this is not surprising, but the old distinctions between business, consumer and enterprise software are longer clear.

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Software or service?  

Something else I see is that the distinction between software and service is only as important as you make it.

For example, I subscribe to Office 365 as a service but it installs a copy of Office on all my machines. Rental software. I can also run Office apps over the Internet with no local copy. Software as a service. But do I care? Only because of differences in the feature sets.

My friend, Frank Cohen, whom I also do some work for, is building a platform for creating and deploying consumer “engagement apps” for big brand companies. Yes, the interface will be as consumer friendly as Frank & Team can make it, but there is really no need for consumers, even business consumers, to use or need a VOTSH Engagement Server.

In Frank’s case, it is very important — or so potential funders keep saying — to be positioned as enterprise software and never as a service. The big difference isn’t how the software works, but how customers pay for it.

We are fortunate to have flexibility we could only imagine a decade or so ago. Yes, we need common language to communicate clearly, but we should not let arbitrary thinking define how we use — or think of — these wonderful tools.

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