In July, I interviewed Bill Briggs, CTO of Deloitte, on wearables in the enterprise, a subject he’s written a great deal about. The whole interview is great, and here’s one nugget:

The real potential comes from not just doing the things you’ve always done and porting them to mobile devices, but empowering the business with net-new solutions that would not have been possible without mobile. – Bill Briggs

In April, I wrote about a changing Microsoft in Microsoft climbs aboard the new infrastructure economics, when the company started zero cost licensing on devices with screens smaller than nine inches.

The new economics of computer infrastructure is that operating systems are free. That’s what has become the norm for smartphones, tablets, and most recently, with Apple’s decision to make OS X Mavericks free (see What Apple’s zero pricing of iOS, Mac OS X, and iWork means), and Google’s approach with Android.

Microsoft is also in the position of having a very weak hand to play in the under nine inch device market, so Microsoft’s Nadella, the new CEO, is taking away the price barrier to any partners who want to make phones or tablets running Windows. Nokia was Microsoft’s biggest partner for Windows phones, and the merger of the two companies will be consummated next month.  So, whatever revenue the company might have received from an independent Nokia will soon be moot, anyway.

This is most obviously a play against Google’s Android — which which makes up over 75% of smartphones sold — and to a lesser extent, Apple, whose iOS captures the great majority of profits in the smartphone business. If Microsoft wants either share or profits it will have to be shipped on more platforms: hence, the new economics.

But I am betting that some time soon, Microsoft will drop the carefully drawn line of demarcation — the nine inch screen — and simply make Windows free everywhere.

Microsoft has been totally mum about the price of Windows 10, although Microsoft’s COO, Kevin Turner, said a few weeks ago

We’ve got to monetize it differently.

Maybe it will be free with a subscription service, like Office and Office 365?

I explored curiosity as one of the key work skills for the future in May, writing

Curiosity can be repositioned as the desire to learn, to be open to the pursuit of digging into the unknown. In a world where the rate of change is accelerating, we need to accelerate our rate of learning, and so we need to become more curious all the time.

But we shouldn’t try to emulate the undirected, aimless curiosity of a three-year-old wandering in the woods, turning over every stone. We need a more systematic curiosity, of the sort that designers and artists apply, where hypotheses are shared and discussed, experiments are conducted, and results noted.

Curiosity occurs in the absence of extrinsic rewards, and people vary greatly in their degree of curiosity, or their responses to events and contexts that spur curiosity. It’s built into our brains, where we are rewarded for being curious with dopamine, the Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters.

I believe that the most creative people are insatiably curious. They ask endless questions, they experiment and note the results of their experiments, both subjectively and interpersonally.

I looked at a model of curiosity that shows exactly what companies can do to block it:

• Autonomy — Curiosity increases in the context of encouragement, information, and choice. Threats, punishment, surveillance, and negative feedback all decrease curiosity.
• Competence — Curiosity is enhanced when events lead people to believe they can interact effectively with the environment, or when events give them the desire to do so. Sincere praise also affects curiosity postitively.
• Relatedness — Feeling connected to others and believing your emotional experiences are acknowledged increases curiosity in work, athletic, and academic environments. Feeling safe and comfortable also has a positive impact.

In June, I wrote The consumerization of work, or the enterprization of life?, where I wondered about Facebook at Work, the new initiative in Facebook to create a version of that social network for use inside of other companies.

Yammer got its start as ‘Twitter for the enterprise’. I was there at Techcrunch when Yammer was launched with that straightforward positioning, and they won the conference competition, and went ahead to be acquired by Microsoft for $1.3 billion. Yammer uses the technology, and now, so do many others in Microsoft. And from what I’m hearing, it’s changing the way that Microsofties get their work done, and they are using email less.

But why is there no Twitter at Work? Why hasn’t Dick Costolo productized a version of Twitter for general business use? Don’t Twitterites use it for getting work done? Probably not, since there is no Facebook Groups equivalent, which sort of stops it in its tracks.

But now, it seems, we will have a Facebook at Work. However, other recent news makes that potentially creepy. It seems that Facebook researchers published a study in which they were intentionally attempting to manipulate the emotional state of Facebook users, basically to see if they could (see Facebook Doesn’t Understand The Fuss About Its Emotion Manipulation Study). Or, perhaps better said, they were trying to determine if emotions spread virally. And, yes they do. So if you intentionally filter feeds so that positive happy emotions are transmitted, then those reading them will be happier. And vice versa.

Leaving aside the furor about Facebook doing such a thing — and the terms of service agreement that allows them to do this sort of research — think about the general premise: businesses could, in fact, manipulate the emotional state of workers by choosing what sort of messages to float through the company’s work management tools. Or put into the most positive spin: companies could potentially influence the vibe at work just by picking which messages should be more aggressively spread than others. Is it really any worse than happy music in the elevators, or the inspirational posters in the cafeteria? Yes, probably. And it makes me wonder what else Facebook might be doing with its own workforce.

And sometime in 2015, we will find out more about Facebook for Work, and whether it’s creepy or cool.