I wonder if that's less efficient though because now every employee has to manage a server, rather than having a small dedicated team that can manage hundreds or thousands of servers.
Just have a fleet of NUC like things (that have ECC RAM ones) that you ship around if they break. You could have them boot from network/CDN and never worry about imaging, too.
With 1Gb+ residential internet speeds, you could probably build a fairly robust and scalable platform like this.
If companies are seriously considering this, they should instead figure out how to distribute applications across their workstations to begin with, no need to distribute extra hardware if you can ensure security, connectivity, and uptime of a single laptop at each employees house.
Rack servers are significantly more powerful than NUC. This means going to need more little servers. And more employees or employees that host lots of servers and turn into point of failure. There are also powerful servers, like database, that can’t be split.
How many people do you think have symmetric gigabit? The company is going to have to pay for employees to upgrade. And do some separation to keep from saturating link from either work or home.
With 1Gb+ residential internet speeds, you could probably build a fairly robust and scalable platform like this.