Work or Private internet?

I normally don’t spend much time reading through the comments section but after reading Ben Evans piece on “forgetting about mobile internet” (as in stop calling it mobile internet, it’s now THE internet), I found myself reading through most of the comments as I found the conversation quite interesting.

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/1/forget-about-mobile-internet

A lot of people seem to think that mobile internet (sorry Ben, I’ll call it that for simplicity) will take over and dominate in the private space but that a lot of the commenters had trouble seeing that it would dominate in the work space.

I’m surprised people seem to distinguish between work and private based on their touch point to the internet. To me, the dichotomy between work and private is purely a software and hardware issue, not an internet issue. As in:

I am today painfully separated between my private and work life in terms of the software and hardware I use and really I wish that I wasn’t. As I do a large proportion of my job in Excel, I need special hardware (a full-sized keyboard and yes, with the silly ex-banker-setup with no F1 button) and special software (a PC-version of Excel) in order to work well. I am however totally agnostic to my touch point to the internet and whether it’s desktop or mobile.

Over time (speculating on the horizon is difficult), I am fairly confident that even my iPhone will have a version of Excel that is equivalent of my PC version (or bring on something completely new, I’m all ears!) and that when I get to work in the morning, I will only need to put my phone in a docking station where my keyboard and large screen are already connected and then I’ll be ready to roll.

Distinguishing between the type of software and hardware you require is the right way to define between work and private — not the way you access the internet — which if you read Ben’s post and have not been living under a rock for the last 5 years, will be mobile, whether you like it or not.