"consumer enterprise" applications

From a thoughtful piece from Ken Norton, who has left Yahoo for Jotspot. "When I sat down with Joe to talk about JotSpot, I was a bit skeptical of serving the enterprise. I'd sworn off enterprise software, and really wanted to keep building consumer Internet products. What I realized is that Joe and Graham feel the same way, and that JotSpot is decidedly not an enterprise company. My epiphany was recognizing that I don't hate products that are used in a corporate setting. I just hate products that aren't built for users. The vast majority of enterprise products are built for the people who are going to purchase, administer, configure, deploy, and provision them. And these products are often despised by the people who ultimately do try to use them (duh). No wonder a large percentage of enterprise software efforts go up in smoke. The enterprise software market is broken for this reason. Companies like Salesforce.com have recently demonstrated that you can build products for users and sell them in the enterprise the way you sell services to consumers. Geoff Yang, a JotSpot investor, calls it the "consumer enterprise." It's the same thing we set out to do at Grand Central five years ago - and what the company is still doing - although we were a bit early. The people who feel the pain of enterprise software are the ones who will buy Jot's product, and they're the ones who will use it. And since it's web-based, it has far more in common with the consumer Internet products I've built than with the clunky enterprise software applications it's destined to replace. That was a really thrilling concept for me."