The Way We Work: Telecommuting, UMPCs, and Centralized Computing

Once upon a time, people wore suits to work. They sat at their desks for eight hours, then got in their cars and went home.

This situation might still be true for a lot of people, but for a good number it isn’t anymore. Telecommuting is an increasingly popular option in the modern workforce, and will likely grow more popular in response to rising gas prices, shrinking corporate travel budgets, and pervasive connectivity.

Other people may not telecommute by choice but by necessity — for example, commuters affected by the collapse of a crucial stretch of freeway near the San Francisco Bay Bridge this weekend.

“It’s going to be miserable for commuters,” Kevin Klowden, managing economist at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, told the San Francisco Chronicle. If you have the option to work from home, why would you bother with packed subway cars or jammed freeways?

In addition to the flexibility of working from home, more workers want the mobility of portable devices. Ten years ago, only executives needed laptops and PDAs. Now in many companies laptops are the exception rather than the rule; PDAs have gone the way of the dodo; and everybody from the CEO to the mailroom clerk is addicted to his or her BlackBerry.

UMPCs will probably play an important role in corporate mobile computing, but the technology is still evolving. As Tom Krazit notes on CNET News,

A lot of dominoes will have to fall in the right places for [high-end smartphones to be replaced by UMPCs]: Intel will have to deliver its low-power chips, get its hardware partners to build compelling devices, convince developers to write software with a mobile experience in mind, and figure out a way to deliver an always-on Internet connection. And the final product has got to cost around $400.

That sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, but the market is making progress in all these areas. Not all of the dominoes will fall in the right place at the right time, and the popular UMPC of the future might not look the way we imagine it will look or behave the way we imagine it will behave. But we’re pretty sure about one thing: as flexibility and mobility become ever more crucial to how business operates, it will become that much more important to centralize computing resources. With different devices and locations adding more complexity to corporate systems, the only way to manage this vast tangle of assets will be to centralize at least one thing: the data.