2020 was a banner year for both laptop and desktop sales. According to Fortune, total sales rose 13 percent from 2019, with more than 300 million devices shipped — the highest number since 2014.
Not surprisingly, the biggest driver of this demand came from enterprises looking to support hybrid and remote work at scale. That trend is not going away as the pandemic ebbs: According to Owl Labs, almost 70 percent of workers were working remotely last year, and half of them say they won’t return to a job that doesn’t offer at least some work-from-home option.
At the same time, workers are spending far more time in meetings than they ever did while they were working full time onsite. According to the 2021 Microsoft Work Trend Index, weekly meeting time has increased an eye-popping 148 percent since February of 2020.
Given those trends, it’s critical that organizations equip their workers with the right technology to maximize their productivity while keeping them satisfied in hybrid work scenarios — and that’s become a problem, because many have not done so, nearly two years into the remote work shift.
In fact, the Work Trend Index found that 42 percent of employees say they lack basic office essentials. That’s not good, especially when 4 in 10 say they are considering leaving their current employer within the next year, compared with 30 percent who said the same a year ago.
DISCOVER: Learn more about how the Surface Laptop Go can enable your workforce.
“When the pandemic hit, many enterprises were understandably in reaction mode and procured whatever devices they could to send home with their employees,” says Luke Madden, Senior Surface Portfolio Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft. “Now, 20 months in, people are rethinking their work environment. They need to rethink what a modern device strategy is to align to that new environment.”
Microsoft Surface Laptop Go Can Replace Most Work Computers
One device that can maximize the productivity of hybrid workers is the Surface Laptop Go. “It has a price point that makes it attractive to buy at scale but has the design features, power and security that staff need to do their best work,” Madden says. Put simply, it delivers essential experiences everywhere: at home, on the road or in the office.
Launched in October 2020, the Surface Laptop Go offers a 12.4-inch screen and up to 13 hours of battery life backed by a 10th generation Intel i5 processor — all weighing just 2.45 pounds. This allows entry-level, back-office workers, or virtual desktop infrastructure users who traditionally have received heavy, clunky laptops or desktop computers, a sleek, modern device that allows them to power through an entire day of work.
While Madden notes that 80 to 90 percent of companies are still buying desktop computers on the assumption that they’re less expensive and more secure, the advent of hybrid work means this isn’t always the case. “We’ve heard stories of employees being told to unplug their desktops from their office desk, putting them in their car, and then plugging them in and working from the dining room table. What started off as a reactive measure in some cases has become the norm.” With staff constantly shifting between in-home and corporate offices, desktops lack the flexibility to keep up.
Madden describes the Surface Laptop Go as an “elevated entry point laptop” that delivers on key benefits, such as:
- Design features: “Entry-point laptops typically lack certain elements that the higher end provides; it’s a trade-off,” Madden says: “With a lot of other devices, the trade-off people make is on design features that actually make the device more pleasant to use.” The Surface Laptop Go, meanwhile, combines solid performance and minimal weight with premium materials to create a feature-rich experience.
- Advanced security: Security is a core tenet of the Surface portfolio. This means that every device includes chip-to-cloud security that’s fully integrated with the Microsoft surface stack to help reduce remote work risk by improving IT visibility.
- Modern device management: “Surface devices are set up for modern management. Traditionally, a vendor would ship a laptop to the office, install the golden image and then send to staff,” says Madden, referring to the template for a virtual machine. “If you buy it from Microsoft or a Microsoft partner like CDW, it can be shipped straight to your house, and all instances are downloaded from the cloud in just a few minutes.”
Also worth noting: Microsoft has a steady supply chain for its Surface Laptop Go, meeting the needs of businesses during a time when end-user devices are scarce.
Microsoft Surface Laptop Go Offers Exceptional Reliability
No matter how reasonable the price point or how attractive the device, no laptop becomes an enterprise workhorse if it doesn’t actually work. Madden puts it simply: “The devices we have should get out of the way so that we can do the work we want to do.”
This is where the Surface Laptop Go excels. By making it easy for users to get up and running in the cloud while offering the ability to work anywhere — as a stand-alone device at home or as a docked device in the office — the Surface Laptop Go helps staff stay productive as they switch between desktops and laptops. They get the same seamless and familiar experience wherever they are.
That’s the real value of the Surface Laptop Go. It empowers business operations not by offering an entirely new experience or an untested environment but by providing a safe, stable and streamlined environment that works exactly as expected — anywhere, anytime.
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