It might come as a shock for enterprise information technology managers who have been used to thinking about “phones” as essential tools, but as use of mobile devices has grown, that cannot be a foundational assumption anymore, says Brownlee Thomas, Forrester Research.
Hardwired office desk top phones, some costing several hundred dollars apiece, and a very lucrative business for suppliers, are on their last legs, said Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates.
They will follow the same path as landline phones have in residences, Gold argues, where already 25 percent of consumers in the United States have abandoned them for the convenience of their mobile phones.
As with many other transformations happening in the communications business, the gradual shift away from desktop phones will not be sudden. As currently is the case with consumer fixed-line devices, there might someday soon be a slow, steady migration to fewer devices on desks at first, but nothing so startling as to call into question the general reliance on fixed devices.
Still, it is easy enough to predict the “early adopter” business cases. Organizations that have significant workers who travel extensively, and prefer to use their mobiles, will find it easiest to switch some workers to softphone clients and mobile only.
