There’s a growing digital divide, and it’s not between the rich and poor, or connected and disconnected (though they exist too, and are perhaps more serious), but a balkanisation of the Internet into regionally available services.

Once upon a time, the Internet was going to transcend national boundaries, but today instead the Internet is a highly fragmented place, with companies forced into offering services limited by legal rules and borders, not customer demand or technical ability.

The perfect example of this is the Amazon navigation bar in the USA, now heavily into digital services, as highlighted by Ryan Spoon – which now lists digitial services in the most important positions, rather than books or CDs. Unlimited Instant Videos, Cloud Player, Cloud Drive, Kindle, Android App Store, Digital Games, and Audible Audiobooks are now the major links for Amazon USA. Out of that list, Amazon UK sells only two of those services, the Amazon Kindle, and Audible Audiobooks (which is hidden under the books, then Audiobooks, then you follow a banner link to Audible).

The difference is incredible, and Amazon are not the only organisation suffering from these issues of legality and licencing, the only question now is will the digital borders get stronger or weaker, and will European and other countries continue to miss out on huge ranges of digital services, due to the complexity of cross-border Internet businesses?

After reading a post on the changing role of the CIO by Joe Baguley (follow him on Twitter, he writes lots of interesting things), it got me thinking about the changing role of enterprise IT suppliers.

In a world where CIO’s are (or should be) looking for managed services to provide similar functionality to the kind of services that their users are getting for free like GMail, or for a low cost, such as their smartphone hooking into Google Calendaring and Facebook automatically, will there be a big rise in “enterprise ready” clones of popular consumer services, from the traditional enterprise suppliers?

There’s no doubt that the IBM, EMC and Microsofts of the world have the technical ability to build these enterprise alternatives, but at the moment they seem largely focussed on rebuilding their own existing products with a utility computing billing model. Instead of a secure Dropbox clone with the option of hosting data internally with data encryption controlled by the enterprise security team, we get things like Sharepoint Online from Microsoft – a solid implementation of their existing application.

Sharepoint’s good at what it does, but no one has ever been sat at home trying to upload some photos and thought to themselves “If only I had my own personal Sharepoint site to help me share my photos and notes from my holiday”.

These kind of pain points are what are driving the rise in the shadow IT services Joe talks about in his original post, but at the moment I don’t see them being addressed by the incumbent suppliers.

It seems to me that if the existing enterprise suppliers don’t start to focus on the pains felt by the individual user, they’ll soon find their old best friend the CIO becoming distinctly unhappy with them, as the CIO gets berated from all sides by people asking “Why can’t I…?”

What do you think? Will the giants of IT start to build copies of successful consumer products for the enterprise, or will they leave it to the consumer start-ups to extend their already successful products into enterprise ready options?