Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

With computer hardware poised on the brink of being truly portable, via the utilization of denser chips and innovative I/O devices, the business computing community is left waiting for the software to catch up. The truly mobile computing paradigm requires that most of the applications and data reside on Web servers, and not on the local computer. As we said last time, this requires much better security than we have today.

When this is the case, the computer in the field becomes the lighter-weight client and the Web servers become the workhorses. The user will only need those portions of the applications and data that they are working with at any given moment. This represents the Cloud Computing and Software as a Service models being taken to the logical extreme.

With flash drives getting denser and less expensive, and with the combination of reduced power consumption requirements and better energy storage technology, it will be possible to do everything that we do in our office today from the beach tomorrow, without even the constant need for an electrical outlet. All the heavy lifting can be done by powerful web servers. Everything that we need, as business people, can be made available on a device that will fit in a man's shirt pocket with room to spare.

There are privacy and “overconnectedness” issues connected with this new paradigm, but there are also answers to some of the hard questions, such as the rising costs of housing employees and the monetary and environmental costs of moving employees between home and office twice a day. If it is true efficiency that we are looking for, the ultra-mobile business computer offers it in spades.