Back when the personal computer made its entry into the business world – much to the dismay of corporate IT staffs – PCs were often bought by employees themselves. (I remember lugging my Mac Plus back and forth to work in the mid-80s; Apple offered a duffel-bag-sized “case” for just that purpose.) But the employee-owned business PC didn’t last very long. The PC, as well as the other computing devices people use in their jobs, quickly became cogs in the corporate computing system – and another capital expense for businesses. People still bought their own PCs, but those were “home computers.” And so we arrived at the point where we remain today, where many people have a set of computing devices owned and maintained by their employer and another set that they own and maintain themselves.
Of course, the digital divide between business devices and personal devices has always been more theoretical then real. People do personal stuff on their corporate PCs, and they do business stuff on their home PCs. In the last couple of years, the divide has begun to blur completely, thanks to the ubiquity of the internet, the proliferation of networked computing devices like smartphones, and the increasing delivery of software applications over the web.
The time may have arrived when personal and business computing merge, at the device level, and companies get out of the business of buying PCs and other end-user devices altogether. One CIO who is already adopting this new model, according to an article in Computerworld, is Bill Leo of the consulting firm Oliver Wyman Delta. He has put into place a program, so far voluntary, that encourages employees to use their own PCs for work. In addition to cutting capital expenses, the program would allow Leo to reduce IT labor costs and shift the IT department’s focus to higher-value work.
What makes this possible is the ability to serve up a secure, virtual “corporate desktop” over the network. The corporate PC doesn’t really disappear, in other words; it just shifts from being a machine to being a software artifact maintained in a central server or even a utility data center. Says Leo: “The first thing you have to do is move applications off the desktop and onto the Web.” Virtualization and the internet render the corporate desktop, and the corporate network, portable. It can appear on any device, with greater security and lower maintenance costs than were possible when the business desktop was tied to a particular physical device.
Gartner is predicting that within a year “10% of companies will require employees to purchase and maintain their own notebooks and other devices,” according to the Computerworld piece. This new approach to closing the divide between the business PC and the home PC will, in the near term, make more sense for certain types of companies, like professional services firms with lots of mobile employees, than for others. Still, you can see how, as supporting technologies like virtualization, thin computing, and software services mature, it could well revolutionize corporate computing at the all-important point where it meets the individual employee. Computing is being freed from the computer.
This is nothing new. When multitasking OSs like UNIX arrived, the computer console gave way to time sharing and the remote dump terminals. Legacy systems still run with terminal emulators on PCs.
Remember how technological heretics like Larry Ellison tried to encourage the adoption of thin clients and network computers in the 1990s? Because a lot of wealth and jobs were tied to WinTel, no one wanted to phase out PCs back then even thought there were cheaper alternatives.
Sadly enough a lot of “IT” jobs are still tied to PCs, Bill Gates expensive money eating dinosaur sitting on your desk. That’s all going away. If your job is tied to PCs, better look for a different career. Best regards to Captain Dunsil!
I wonder what this means for Microsoft. I admit that while this is likely to accelerate, my experience tells me that it will be a slow processes. Enterprises are just too lazy
What this means for Micro$oft? M$ Windows is practically a service now anyway. If you get XP or Vista you can’t activate it without a Internet connection, you need automated updates and, of course, virus and spam protection – all services not software. My guess is that “per seat” software licenses will give way shortly to “subscriptions” with the software coming free of charge. That’s what Google is doing with Star Office and will probably kick M$ Office’s butt!
The phase out just isn’t due to enterprises being lazy, corporate slots associated with PCs are part of an obtuse archaic wealth redistribution system. Most legit business have or will soon adopt the service utility model. It’s only the corporate socialists who will still have the IT dinosaurs, like Chang and Patel, running around the office carrying PCs and fixing tickets.
While I think this will be a trend, I don’t think it will be a wipe-out-the-old-way trend. As Nick points out, this is a great idea for certain kinds of employees in certain kinds of companies. But there will always be employees that need the devices and the support provided to them, for a variety of reasons. Don’t quit your PC support job just yet.
This strikes me as a logical fracturing of the computing market, much like the arrival of video on the web is a threat to traditional broadcast TV. Web video and TV today coexist, though each takes viewing time away from the other, making smaller markets for both.
At my company, looking around at the self-management capacities of my coworkers, I can see about 30% could move over to a self-sourced PC model fairly easily. About 20% couldn’t/shouldn’t do it at all. That leaves a soft 50% that could go either way, depending on implementation model. YMMV.
I dont know Nick…from a security, data privacy, virus protection and IP ownership perspective that could be a nightmare….companies have made a lot of pogress on standardizing images they want on PCs, automating patches, encryption, asset tracking etc…even then when the Dell battery problem hit some of them took weeks to even inventory what they had…can you imagine with a potpourri of laptops the risks and issues..I can see a subsidized model, but completely employee choice driven?
Don’t confuse the demand of techies with the demands of other types of business. Almost all business apps are browser based now. For most of the demands of non technical business, a thin client flashed with an image with the proper configuration and a browser will work just fine. As culture and business practices begin to evolve around mobile devices the demands for the oblong boxes on desks will disappear. The king is dead. Long live the king.
Nick,
I agree with your opinion.”computing should be freed from your computer”.
You are talking about a scenario where users are given virtual desktops through technologies like virtualization and cluster computing.This is definitely the way to go as it will cut across geographies, limitations of equipment cost, tool availablity etc..
With internet, data and information is available everywhere but with virtualization and related trends, the tools and computing resources are available anywhere anytime.
Thanks,
Arun.PC
The only unfortunate side effect of this phenom is that for me, at least, “remote desktop” has become a verb. I managed a virtual workplace for five years, and even in my new job, the main purpose of the physical plant is to allow us a place to do meatware networking (which is a perfectly reasonable activity). I often don’t know if someone’s “in” or not. At least for 95% of office activity, we don’t need the physical plant for computing services the way we used to.