During his keynote speech last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona John Chambers spoke of a shift Cisco is seeing from personalized communication to social networking.  As Chambers put it, "it's no longer about you, it's about us.".

Chambers is always eager to challenge mainstream views.  Personalization has been arguably the most important trend in client devices for the past few years, but as consumer driven social networking tools (including everything from Facebook to Twitter) find their way into a business context, there is potential for massive implications to network architecture, business processes and productivity, and even regulatory and competitive trends.

On the surface this might seem like a signal of a shift back to a network centric model, rather than the client centric push of the last few years.  And the pendulum does tend to swing back and forth on these issues.  I think that Chambers is on to something slightly different here, however.  In many interviews he's stated a belief that consumer trends will precede business ones, and much of Cisco's strategy in the past few years bears out this belief.

So rather than network centric vs client centric, maybe technology is finally becoming user centric.  Users want personalization and control, and they want personal productivity.  Having that, we're seeing that users want to be in communication and to communicate.  So rather than swinging away from client to network, maybe we're seeing more of a coming together rather than moving to one extreme or another.

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