Mar 3, 2010
Is a Virtual Office What You Make It?
I was surfing the Web when I found a blast from the past in the form of a Boston Globe article about virtual offices. The headline declared, “Virtual office is what you make it.”
That piqued my attention, so I read on with the understanding that the article is more than three years old at the time of this writing. In other words, the well-written article about virtual companies was written in the boom times, before the real estate market crashed and before the stock market followed suit.
Here’s an excerpt from the article, which chronicles the impending virtual office explosion that we are now witnessing:
“While everyone was watching for the telecommuting trend to explode, something else exploded right next to it: The virtual company. The business with no office to telecommute from. These companies give new opportunities to entrepreneurs to get started with no money down. But a virtual business also gives people the opportunity to create the personal life they want. ‘The future is likely to be the age of virtual businesses,’ writes Anita Campbell, founder of Small Business Trends. ‘Forget three guys in a garage — that was your father’s startup. Today it’s three people spread out across the country or even across continents, each in their home offices or back porches with laptops, mobile phones, and WiFi’.”
That captures one of the drivers of the virtual office pretty well – the distributed workforce. The article goes on to list four factors that were leading us to where we are today. Those factors include:
- Workers looking for more work-life balance.
- The rise of telecommuting.
- Technology that makes it inexpensive to telecommute.
- Virtual businesses that can be run on eBay or Amazon.com
It’s interesting to look back to 2006 and what reputable journalists were writing about virtual office space at that time. In a future post, I’m going to try to look back even further so we can see the incremental rise of virtual offices and what drove us to where we are today.
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