The Next Killer App: Telepresence may come to your house next year.
1st September 2007
Cringely always has good stuff, but I’m not sure about the applicability of this for the home; it would appear not to be cost-effective. But, of course, as we all know, what’s not cost-effective today may be dirt cheap and in everyone’s pocket in five years. So we’ll see.
I’ve long thought that we now have the technology available to us to do sort of semi-telecommuting, where a company has, instead of a lot of people in one central location, a bunch of small offices spotted around a metropolitan area (like DFW?) more central to where employees are likely to live.
Say a company has employees who live in Plano, Irving, Carrollton, and Arlington; have four small offices in each city in the little office complexes that are everywhere these days, and people just go to the nearest one as their work site.
Everybody uses e-mail and IM and conference calls these days anyway; in a high-tech company it’s just as easy to ship bytes across town as down the hall. Not only would this dramatically reduce commute times (making the employees happier and the environmentalists happier), but it would reduce the prospects of some disaster like a fire or a hurricane or a power outage killing the entire company’s productivity.