Beyond purpose

A scenario set in the near future:

Monday morning Jo comes into work, a little more dishevelled than she would like and later than she realises. She walks past her colleagues trying not to look incongruous, they had been been tracking her location on Jackie’s desk (since Jackie was the only one with permission), so they knew exactly when to expect her anyway. Jo’s desk is a mess with every square inch covered in scraps of printed paper, three e-ink readers, and leftovers from lunch on Friday. Her two computer screens float a few inches above the mess, supported by an arm mounted behind her desk. Her keyboard is wireless and she has a mobile phone dock with a wire running up the pole and into the right-hand screen.

She takes her phone from her handbag and places it into the docking station, then looks at her screens expectantly. The phone makes the appropriate ‘screens connected’ bleeps and they blink to life after a few seconds, then it reports a warning “Phone unable to connect to bluetooth keyboard”. She curses to herself, as she did last Thursday when this last happened, and scans the desk for a place to dump the pile of paper directly in front of her. She settles on the floor and wipes the dust away from the wirefree charging surface. The keyboard can last for weeks, but she usually forgets and moves it off the charging surface too soon for it to have charged for more than a few days. She puts her keyboard over the surface and impatiently starts pressing keys. Giving up after a few seconds, she taps the phone’s screen to bring up her email.

“Bluetooth keyboard connected”, the phone reports after a few seconds. She then opens the task switcher to open the remote connection to her cloud desktop. It’s not there, she closed the app on Saturday to free up memory for her daughter’s games, so she reloads it. After four seconds, it’s finished loading, automatically detected her wireless network and established a connection to her cloud desktop. Her cloud desktop is the only place she sees the old-fashioned Windows start menu and grey task bar. The first thing she sees is a Microsoft Word window with an unsaved note to herself saying “Don’t forget to phone Mrs Richards”. She realises her bluetooth headset is still in the car but she doesn’t need to talk and type for this call so she grabs her phone from the dock. The screens blink and report “disconnected” before going into energy saving mode.

After the call she puts the phone back, the remote desktop window springs back into life on the screen and she attempts to close Word. “Would you like to save the document?”, no, she clicks. The document had been there just like the rest of her desktop, untouched since Friday when she grabbed the phone from it’s cradle. 

All of that is possible with current technology. Remote desktop access can easily run on modern smartphones, and the very latest can use an external screen. The companies selling virtualisation obviously have a vested interest, but if fraction of their claims are true it could save companies a huge amount of money on infrastructure and equipment. The key factor for me though is the convenience and security of having a computer in a completely different location to the screen and keyboard accessing it.

Having the thin client (the connector between the internet and the screens) as a smartphone makes sense for a few reasons. Most people have one already, particularly ‘knowledge workers’, and a simple thin client isn’t free; a mobile phone would also act as a security device when not in the office (two-factor authentication, which is far better than a password alone and required by some security standards).