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Discord Started With Gaming, but It Might Just Sneak Up on Enterprise Apps
A little less enterprisey than Slack. A little more structured than Clubhouse. It’s just right.
In 2007, when BlackBerry was still the leader in the enterprise mobile space, a new competitor launched an irresistibly sleek touch-screen smartphone that epitomized the marriage of art and science. (Yes, we’re talking about the iPhone’s debut). BlackBerry executives scoffed at the seemingly pretentious device, which they thought would only appeal to consumers seeking mindless escape on YouTube and who possibly couldn’t care less about BlackBerry’s inner beauty — its relentless focus on security and its efficient, almost miserly, use of network bandwidth. BlackBerry’s bet was on what it called the “prosumer,” or the professional consumer.
Apple, however, changed the rules of the game by breaking down the barrier between enterprise and personal mobile devices. It partnered with AT&T to make data usage an expectation, not a limitation. In the workforce, employees enamored by the iPhone began requesting it to be used as their enterprise phones. BYOD (bring your own device) soon entered our vernacular. Consumers increasingly gravitated towards the iPhone, and enterprises followed.
