Ignition mobile app lets you access your PC from anywhere - for a price
For business owners and mobile professionals, apps might be the order of the day, but chances are you're still using a desktop or laptop computer for many business activities. And if you've got sensitive …
Context & Ripple Effects
Ignition's paid remote-access app lands ten months after GigaOM reported that half of computing device sales are mobile — the arithmetic behind the product: professionals carry phones and tablets, but their files and applications still live on a desktop or laptop. The pitch is continuity of access rather than replacement, with security cited as the reason to pay.
It also fits an emerging pattern in the corpus of charging directly for PC-side software through app stores, following Wolfram Alpha's $2.99 PC app earlier in 2012 — small-ticket paid utilities aimed at users who already own the expensive hardware.
First-order effects
- Business owners and mobile professionals gain a way to reach sensitive desktop material from any location, at the cost of a per-user app purchase rather than IT-built infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- If paid remote access proves out, device makers and platform vendors face pressure to bundle equivalent functionality into operating systems or hardware, turning a standalone app category into a feature check-box.
Third-order effects
- The longer-term structure this points toward is the PC demoted to a back-end resource — files and compute parked on a desk while the phone or tablet becomes the primary work surface, with access sold as a service layered on top.
The trend: As mobile devices absorb the majority of computing purchases, the desktop is being repositioned as a remotely accessed resource, with third-party apps monetizing the bridge.