We heard a story from an IT executive in a multinational construction firm in 2010. The company had just implemented a snazzy new telephone and web conferencing system. Once this rolled out, the IT security group took the opportunity to do something it had been hoping to do for a long time - it blocked people on its corporate networks from using Skype, the internet telephone software, and thereby hoped to reduce network congestion and improve security. What happened next surprised everybody - a stream of profane calls and emails from some extremely upset employees. Were these people annoyed they couldn't call their friends on vacation in Tahiti? No, as it turned out, the company's customers in Pakistan and Vietnam were completely dependent on Skype for telephone communication, and the company had just cut them off. (In the end the company relented and restored access to Skype.)
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