Some of these older enterprise tech companies, which also include Cisco and Oracle, will make the transition, just as incumbents like I.B.M. made it from mainframe computers to servers and PC's.
Just as vividly, Autodesk's move into a broader consumer market illustrates how, in a world of computing everywhere, via mobility and cloud computing, older enterprise companies are looking to broaden their base of users to make up for a possible downturn in revenue.
But like other older enterprise services, the traditional approach to BI has been to offer it as costly on-premise software.
It actually boils down to making a product that people want to use, as consumers are already using cloud products, and fall back on them when their older enterprise solutions fail.
It's been a juicy summer, as older enterprise giants like Oracle and Salesforce plus ads businesses like Google who hesitated to build social marketing products or services buy late stage startups in the space.
Instead of trying to build a fancy superstructure of features like older enterprise software companies, it has focused on the humble task list as the the most important feature to help people organize and complete their work more quickly.
Microsoft's "Skype for Business," which is designed to replace the company's older enterprise communication tool Lync, is rolling out publicly today as part of the Office 2013 April update, the company announced this morning.
In meetings with the writers, Piller suggested that the Enterprise crew immediately undergo changes due to the presence of the older Enterprise, and that Guinan be integral to the realization that something was wrong.
"Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code used in two of our older enterprise products has been accessed, one of which has been discontinued," Cris Paden, a spokesman for Symantec, said in an email on Friday.
Senior managers in old enterprises are used to working to orders from the top, and they lack the innovative ideas required by the new culture.
