The scheme began in February 2000, and has so far distributed 166,000 computers among the company's workforce. The Ford Motor Company has scrapped an initiative to give all its employees a home PC with net access for just $5 a month.
To achieve the ultimate level of mobility, employers will need to know exactly where the workforce is located at any time. Certainly, there will be different rules for managing and monitoring the performance of the workforce.
Managers have to learn how to control a distributed workforce by managing by results rather than by managing their time. First, virtual teams are being increasingly used to support distributed global organisations.
In a research report into the 21st century workforce, analyst house Quocirca predicts: "In the future it may make sense for businesses to have more numerous small locations near to centres of population to reduce commuting and be closer to customers.
For example, a smaller company might find it useful to implement home working as everyday practice, meaning its workforce is geographically distributed. In reality, good security requires fundamental organisational change, says Danny Bradbury
This distributed computing paradigm allows for a highly mobile workforce, which has created demand for technologies that enable workers to remotely access their organisation's centralised network resources.