Why are we waiting?

Consider the office laptop. It certainly may be used in the office, where its owner, a company employee, requires the best user experience for accessing the software needed to do their work when in the office.

The key phrase is “in the office”. When people are out and about, they generally have different requirements. Some may not need, or indeed, may not be fortunate enough to have adequate mobile internet coverage, to provide the fullest and most seamless access to all the rich functionality available to them when they are in the office. Digital employee experience changes, depending on the environment the user is in and the task they need to do.

Total cost of ownership versus positive digital experience

In the early 1990s, analyst Gartner warned that the average enterprise PC was costing $5000 (about £4000) a year, that’s equivalent to well over $10,000 (£8000) in today’s money, which, incidentally, represents over 60% of the salary of someone in the UK on minimum wage working a 35-hour week. It is no surprise then that IT departments took drastic measures to slash PC costs, by rolling out managed desktop IT environments, where pretty much everything was locked down.

A fully locked-down environment is as secure as you can get on a personal computer. But compared to the rich user experience on a modern smartphone or tablet device, it is not usually a particularly desirable or even a modestly usable way for people to engage with corporate IT systems.

It is all very well for corporate IT to draw on industry best practices and apply a gold build to all software images across the business, perhaps with slight modification for different job roles and categories of user, in terms of the IT security rights and specific applications they need to do their job.

But people generally do not all work the same way and generally like to set up their laptops to suit how they like to work. It is certainly not a good experience when people who present to clients and customers blame the PC as it boot up all the unnecessary applications that are usually superfluous to the task in hand. Consider this: if a PC takes over three minutes to start up and you only want to do a few quick tasks and then shutdown, the last thing you need is to wait ages to boot and then wait for cloud applications to update.

One would hope there is a smarter approach. The industry talks about how agentic AI will save people hours, in helping them work more efficiently. Let’s start at boot time, and use this technology to understand what applications we really need to get started immediately when we power up the laptop.