A look at work-from-home trends: rise of “desktop as a service”, purpose-built hardware for remote communication, and more investment in home office equipment
Tens of millions of Americans are working from home and many will never go back; employers scramble to figure out what tools they'll need to stay productive
Wall Street JournalChristopher Mims
Context & Ripple Effects
In July 2020, with tens of millions of Americans working from home and many expected never to return, employers are scrambling to provision them — driving three parallel moves: desktop-as-a-service shifting the enterprise desktop market off owned devices, purpose-built hardware for remote communication, and direct employer spending on home office equipment.
This piece sits at the start of an arc the related coverage confirms ran long. Twitter's two-years-in-the-making work-from-home plan had already triggered a wave of corporate copycats by that October; by early 2022 tech leaders were treating flexibility and geographically dispersed hiring as staples rather than pandemic stopgaps.
First-order effects
Employers redirect equipment budgets toward employees' homes — buying home office gear and subscribing to desktop-as-a-service instead of provisioning office desks, which puts new revenue in the hands of DaaS providers and remote-communication hardware makers right now.
IT departments built around the managed office endpoint must retool for endpoints they don't physically control, changing what enterprises buy and how they support it.
Second-order effects
Device mix inverts: per the related coverage, some workers who started remote on laptops switched to desktops, helping drive global desktop shipments up an estimated 7% YoY in 2021 after a sharp 2020 drop — forcing PC makers to keep desktop lines alive they might have wound down.
Competitors are pulled into policy mimicry: once Twitter's permanent-remote stance created copycats, rival employers must offer comparable flexibility or compete for talent at a structural disadvantage.
Third-order effects
Home-office tooling hardens from emergency expense into a permanent line item: even as Big Tech compels returns to the office, firms like Atlassian, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twilio remain steadfast remote backers, so vendors serving distributed teams face a market split between two durable camps rather than a temporary boom.
If dispersed hiring holds as tech leaders expect, the employee's residence becomes a standard IT endpoint — a shift that favors delivered-as-a-service computing over owned devices and makes home equipment spending a recurring corporate cost.
The trend: The home office is becoming a permanently provisioned IT endpoint, with enterprise desktop spending shifting from company-owned offices and devices to services and equipment located where employees live.
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