The Small Office of the Future

I have a customer who has been in the same business for many years and who told me that, ten years ago, he rented office space and had a secretary and a book-keeper. Today, he runs the same operation, except bigger, himself from an office in his home with a computer and an Internet connection. We can probably look forward to the same pace of changes over the next ten years.

One of the key developments is going to be in the speed of the Internet connections. Most people still have a slow dial-up connection which is fine for text-based e-mail and for looking at simple web sites but it becomes useless for higher-level applications such as video. I suspect that, with broad-band access becoming widespread and less expensive, most people will have connections which will allow them to send multi-megabyte files in a matter of seconds.

When that happens, I wonder whether it will not be faster and more efficient to switch on your web camera, record your message and send it out rather than type the message as text. Of course, at that point, video-conferencing becomes an option but I often find that live interaction is not necessarily the best; I like to think about my points, make them and then give my partner time to develop his thoughts.

Once this mode of communication is common, you will want to use your computer to not only record such video messages but also to edit them. Just like we now spell-check and edit our text messages, our computers will be powerful enough to edit our video messages. This means that you can also send and receive video reports on something that happened but, with the editing and image creation capabilities of these computers, we will have to get used to the fact that, just because we can see it on video, doesn't mean it actually happened.

Such more powerful computers will be able to do a better job at some of the things they do right now - such as voice recognition. When you need text-based material, your computer will be able to take dictation and output the document in full colour on any medium you might need.

The site smalloffice.com has compiled a vision of the office of the next millenium with interesting links to products which will be used then. In ten years we'll be astounding the young, newly minted computer specialists with tales about how we actually used to have to type everything and send it as text.

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