The Laptop is the New Desktop, and the Smartphone/Tablet is the new laptop
Monday, November 15th, 2010 Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
One trend that we’ve seen with our customer base, and our Mobile Workforce survey data reinforces this, is that increasingly more and more workers are leaving their laptops in the office. This doesn’t mean they are working less, nor that the concept of mobile productivity is declining. What is happening is that mobility is shifting to the smartphone and the tablet. Employees are deciding that these smartphones, and increasingly tablets, are functional enough to perform many of the work functions they need while remote.
When I first started covering remote access nearly 10 years ago, I used to talk about the key enablers for working remote was:
- getting the connectivity you needed to be productive,
- having a device that enabled you to work remote, and
- leveraging applications that were designed with the remote user in mind.
With the rise of broadband connectivity 10-15 years ago, combined with increasingly affordable and functional laptop devices, along with applications designed with the mobile user in mind, we saw that first push for working remote. What has happened is that in each of those three areas we have seen dramatic evolution that is allowing mobile employees to work remotely in more places with a new range of devices.
- broadband connectivity has pushed out beyond a tethered connection and is available in even more places,
- Smaller devices are doing more with less and can leverage those wireless connections, and
- Applications have evolved to really remove the need for that fat client/server connection with the advent of Web front ends for accessing data on the LAN and the rise of cloud based computing.
So what does this mean? It means that increasingly the laptop is increasingly relegated to the office, and it has become the new desktop. And these new devices, the smartphone and the tablet, have become the new laptop, opening up new possibilities for mobile workers to stay connected in more places and with more applications on a wider range of devices. Expect the different types of tablet form factors to continue to push this forward, giving employees even more choices in the future.
Tags: enterprise mobility, mobile employee, mobile workforce, smartphone
