Today, Telenor launched the Windows Live Messenger service to mobile users in the Norwegian market. There is nothing revolutionary about the technology, it has been available for some time. However, what is significant is that this is another small step of "educating the population" in our growing Digital Society.

These small steps are great in spreading enterprise and consumer behaviours to society as a whole. If I may draw the parallel to the PC/LAN era -- where the end-user is the consumer/citizen today and the Centralized IT Department is the Telecom provider. It is then heartening to see that the "IT department" has responded to the "end-user" and offered a service that originated in the end-user community. (Instead of saying "No, dear user, those services are rubbish and just a passing fad"). That Telenor could have come with this service earlier is another discussion -- not altogether unrelated. But that's for another post.

Now, how would other service providers like insurance companies, banks etc offer similar services? Am sure there are millions of homegrown "applications" people have created to keep track of investments (in Word, Excel or Access).