You’ve probably heard of the Home of the Future, but I’ve decided to build the Office of the Future. Only it isn’t going to be a fake room in a lab, it is going to be Gold Systems. And not just my office – everyone’s office. Yes, everyone has an office at Gold Systems except for Lori, who has her own skylight. Joel Spolsky aka Joel On Software just wrote about why he thinks offices are important, so I’ll resist the urge to drag out THAT soapbox.
So what does this mean? I’m asking for your help and your ideas. I figure the Office of the Future will be a lot like the office of today, which means we don’t have an unlimited budget to just buy a bunch of shiny things for show. And unless someone brought something in from home, there is nothing here made of Mahogany.
I would expect that communications would be better in the future, and since Gold Systems’s 100 year purpose is "To build a great institution that helps people communicate", we’re going to start there. We’ve actually made a lot of progress already but I’ll write about that another time. My day-to-day communications is already much better than it was six months ago.
I expect this will be a year-long project as we upgrade equipment, install new software and generally figure out how to make everything work well together. Like most companies, we have equipment and software from a lot of different sources and I don’t expect that to change. If your company would like to be a part of this, feel free to email me and I’ll tell you where to ship the loaner/free equipment and/or software if it fits with our plans. (I’m not kidding – a nice contribution to the effort was just made this afternoon) If you contribute equipment or just ideas, and they work well, I’ll make sure people hear about it and you’ll get an invitation to our next screening of Office Space. One lucky contributor will even get to drive the Car of the Future. 🙂
Please leave a comment below with your ideas. Thanks –terry