A piece you're missing: There are three bottom-line benefits to business, not two. The three are increased revenue, decreased cost, and better-managed risk. IT contributes to all three of these.

The business value of most infrastructure updates is risk management, as aging technology carries with it a number of risks (the new printer won't run on the old OS; we rely on an application build on a no-longer-supported-language and won't run on the only desktops we can now buy; to provide just a few tangible examples).

As the author of the article, I'm in a good position to respond. For those who didn't read the entire article, this was a quote from Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption." His point was that IT works better when it recommends superior ways to address the underlying situation, rather than dealing with requests as work orders from customers to which it must respond. It's simply an example of the difference between "You're my customer and my job is to keep you satisfied" and "We're in this together and there's a better way for the two of us to help the company's customers than the one you envisioned." - Bob Lewis

You have to be kidding me. No ifs? No buts?

So in your model, no laptop user should be able to perform useful work in locations where Internet access is slow, unreliable, or unavailable ... for example, in the air or in rural locations?

Your definition of competent and mine apparently differ.