The Internet - the world’s largest office

The scene opens in a master bedroom, when the sun is not out yet but ticklish feet are searching for lost slippers, as rested fingers stretch and get ready for a frantic tap dance on the keyboard. A few clicks later and the world’s largest office opens. Welcome to Google. The big-mama of all connectivity, enabling the searching of the entire globe, connecting to millions via Google Mail, offering calendars, shared schedules, spreadsheets, aerial surveillance, videos and dozens of other nick-nacks necessary to launch a major attack on any business or a personal quest.

Stifled progress

This access to an omnipresent, fully functional office is so perfect, that it seriously threatens the world order of bureaucracy, whose red-tape processes have not only stifled progress with unnecessary functionalities, but continue to promote a mindset of dysfunctional square cubicles, dark elevators, and staled-air offices, where there are hourly meetings being held to determine why such meetings are required in the first place.

As the free-floating, nonrestrictive nature of streamlined Internet access and efficiency continue to grow, the Internet community will slowly render the traditional functionality of the office obsolete. The World’s Largest Office is now open; all that’s missing is the water cooler.

Bravo Google, your skateboarding through the corporate corridors over boardroom backstabbing is certainly paying off. All that’s missing from Google are some additional services, like G-banking, job searches and so on.

Did someone say office? What office? In the near future, you will be able to visit the full blown office exhibition at the Museum of Natural History, where young children can relive the rise and fall of the office hierarchy, the disappearance of three hour dry Martini lunches, the final revenge of Dilbert’s armies and their breakdown of the cubicles, and the ultimate elimination of water coolers.

Creatively constructed

Eventually, the prospect of having an office may dissipate, as they are rapidly being replaced by rooms creatively constructed to look like safari camps, art galleries, solariums, fish tanks, kitchens and do not forget the master bedrooms. Offices of the past have done wonders, defined and pioneered by the great corporate leaders who laid the rules of hierarchy and delivered us the hard and soft goods leading to where we are today. A major transition where we are today, where grey flannel meets the colorful cotton, where the mahogany meets rattan and where four walls do not make a prison, nor “in” and “out” trays a cage. Freedom at last surpasses the conventional 9 - 5 model and daily traffic grinds.

Old mainframes first shrunk into micros, then to laptops and now to cigarette- sized USB drives to enable high data portability with several gigabytes in storage capacity. These tools, combined with the external accessibility of Google and dozens of other runners in this space, witness a major office revolution, the portability of the business is on the move and the days of stationary offices are numbered.

This change now incubates from a basic e-commerce approach to an end and new global e-commerce lifestyle dawns. By simply providing free Internet and computer access to an entire nation, the economical landscape can be dramatically altered.

The prevalence of such turnkey Internet solutions such as Google, and Wikipedia further emphasises easy accessibility for mass-connection. Harnessing the same logic behind this principle could bind together an entire city, nation, continent or region within a network of streamlined interconnectivity and unforeseen efficiency, holding the potential to shake the foundations of a nation and boost its GDP significantly.

Old notion

The old notion of hardwiring the entire nation for computer access at a mega cost is now being replaced to setting large Internet cafes at every street corner and let the office-less society become fully accessible world-wide. Hard to imagine phenomena in the making as these young players of e-commerce, move up to image and branding issues and kick start cyber-branding to tackle global commerce.

This is precisely what IBM achieved with its introduction of the Selectric typewriter, which boosted the efficiency of corporate communications among companies, as the art of letter writing among businesses blossomed.

Since the dark ages, businesses have always sought to improve the means and quality of connection between buyers and sellers, by introducing a new medium at every age. From telegrams to faxes to the onset of online directories and vast, community based networks, each nation should strive to maximise this power, which, although free and easily accessible to all, still remains overlooked.

It is now high noon, I am still in the master bedroom and the leading publisher of top world class magazine Office wants to do a cover story with this piece, and then quit, later to join some of us in the local park. Please come with the birdfeed.