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I totally don't agree with his sentiment. And I manage 200,000 endpoints (computer and mobile) This sentiment is a typical early 2000s mindset. It no longer wo

I totally don't agree with his sentiment. And I manage 200,000 endpoints (computer and mobile) This sentiment is a typical early 2000s mindset. It no longer works in this world where the line between business and private lives have blurred. And it wasn't just the pandemic that did that, this has been going on much longer. Who wants to bring 2 laptops on a business trips? Or 2 phones for that matter? Computing is flexible in the age of the cloud. Mobile OSes are really good at separating personal and private data (think of Android's Work Profile and iOS's User Enrolment). Personal computers (either Mac or Windows) don't do this as well yet, but at least they're a hell of a lot more secure with everyone enforcing disk encryption now. But we should remember that technology is there to serve us. If the tech can't deal with our increasing mix of private and business, we'll just have to make it better at that. Telling people not to do it just won't work. I have one exception: Installing personal apps on a work computer is not really OK (unless the application has already been approved for work too). On mobile this is fine because of the more rigid separation. PS: This is not just my opinion, it's the company's policy. We explicitly allow personal use (including apps) of mobile devices and most personal web usage on company laptops (though blocking malicious sites and stuff that's not really "business oriented" :) ). We do block some things like sideloading on mobile. Our devices are still secure because we enforce what's important (like decent passwords, full disk encryption). Our users are happier because we don't treat them like children. We're happier because we don't need to approve every taxi app anymore that a user would want to use on their work phone during a business trip. We just make sure their apps can't access the work apps. On mobile this works really well and on PC/Mac it's in the works. It's a give and take. The early 2000's us-against-them BOFH total lockdown thing just doesn't fly anymore.

jfrunyon 5y ago
Pretty much this. I have no problem with people watching Netflix or checking their email, or whatever. If it's not likely to create security problems for us - or at least, we already accept any security problems it has (as is the case for web browsing)... meh, why would I care?
nemetroid 5y ago
> I have one exception: Installing personal apps on a work computer is not really OK (unless the application has already been approved for work too). So the approved usage is more-or-less only the web browser? If the user can make do with that for their personal stuff, they would probably be happier with a tablet anyway. If they can't, then, well, they need two laptops.
iso1631 5y ago
I know where you're coming from -- a key reason Blackberry failed in my view was that it was pitched to corporate IT and stopped people from doing anything on their device. This worked until the time when people in charge of actual important departments (not BOFHs) were getting iphones for their wives and kids, and wanted to be able to play angry birds on their phone. As that wasn't possible on a blackberry thanks to the IT policies, they said "fine, give me my mail on my iphone as I'm not carrying two phones" In other organisations I'm sure those IT policies remain, but certainly in my part of my organisation I have a vanilla desktop, which replaced my vanilla laptop (haven't used it for 3 years). There's a corporate laptop (which is vanila OSX with MDM), but more and more corporate services are available on web and I haven't used it for over a year. I haven't paid for a mobile phone since I got my first work phone in 2006 (when phones were just for phone calls and sms). Most people in my organization that had phones back then (we tend to stay in the same company for life) are still one-device people. So yes, from an organisation point of view, it's an antiquated mindset about control over worker drones. In my experience, it's younger people who didn't join or get to a point where they had a work phone until after the smartphone revolution, that tend to carry two phones - a personal one and a work one.

jfrunyon 5y ago

Pretty much this. I have no problem with people watching Netflix or checking their email, or whatever. If it's not likely to create security problems for us - or at least, we already accept any security problems it has (as is the case for web browsing)... meh, why would I care?

nemetroid 5y ago

> I have one exception: Installing personal apps on a work computer is not really OK (unless the application has already been approved for work too). So the approved usage is more-or-less only the web browser? If the user can make do with that for their personal stuff, they would probably be happier with a tablet anyway. If they can't, then, well, they need two laptops.

iso1631 5y ago

I know where you're coming from -- a key reason Blackberry failed in my view was that it was pitched to corporate IT and stopped people from doing anything on their device. This worked until the time when people in charge of actual important departments (not BOFHs) were getting iphones for their wives and kids, and wanted to be able to play angry birds on their phone. As that wasn't possible on a blackberry thanks to the IT policies, they said "fine, give me my mail on my iphone as I'm not carrying two phones" In other organisations I'm sure those IT policies remain, but certainly in my part of my organisation I have a vanilla desktop, which replaced my vanilla laptop (haven't used it for 3 years). There's a corporate laptop (which is vanila OSX with MDM), but more and more corporate services are available on web and I haven't used it for over a year. I haven't paid for a mobile phone since I got my first work phone in 2006 (when phones were just for phone calls and sms). Most people in my organization that had phones back then (we tend to stay in the same company for life) are still one-device people. So yes, from an organisation point of view, it's an antiquated mindset about control over worker drones. In my experience, it's younger people who didn't join or get to a point where they had a work phone until after the smartphone revolution, that tend to carry two phones - a personal one and a work one.