The decline and fall of the corporate desktop.

The decline and fall of the corporate desktop

Business and technology changes mean that the standard corporate PC may soon disappear

I have rarely met anyone who has a good word to say about that icon of the computer age, that soulless automaton of despair, the corporate desktop. Apart from, of course, the computer manufacturers who have profited immensely by pandering to that deep-seated desire of enterprises to regiment, control and contain their workforce in the name of security.

OK, so it's a poor attempt at melodrama, but it seems to me that the thinking that has for many years propped up the corporate PC infrastructure is starting to unravel, and things could finally be starting to get interesting for people at both ends of the Ethernet cable.

A couple of things prompted me to start thinking about this. One was a definition I trawled from Google while trying to work out what on earth "rightshoring" means. The result wasn't pretty: "Rightshoring is a mixture of offshoring, outsourcing, nearshoring, two-shoring, global sourcing, insourcing and multi-sourcing."

I'm sorry I asked. I don't know much about any of these multitudinous "-ings", but I do know the effect they've had on at least one multinational company. Offices full of people who perhaps once worked together are now split up, with some roles taken by staff, others by contractors, and with each trying to make sense of their own company's reporting structures that were seemingly created by someone tossing a lace doily over a globe.

Even if my poorly researched definition is only half right, a "rightshored" company is going to have a tough time deciding exactly what a standard corporate desktop even means, especially if the outsourcing contractors consist of companies that are actually bigger than they are.