The Office of the Future

who he was or not. I never know who I am. He violated a very important trademark I did. I'm sorry. It's okay. I think we should have just kept going with it. I think our listeners would have thought it was funny. And now they're all wondering what we're talking about. All right, So let's before we get started into today's episode, just leaving you guys hanging there, let's talk a little bit about Oh God, Punkin Chunkin and orenge you glad

we are? Yeah? Right, So Punkin Chunkin shooting Pumpkins, great distances, television shows, Science Channel with giant machines. Yes, the enormous machines that propel pumpkins. Alright, so the Science Channel showing two shows the roads punkin Chunkin and punkin Chunkin on Thanksgiving, which is November twenty six, starting at eight pm Eastern time, right, and the nine pm, of course, would be the second show, punkin Chunkin. So you can watch people build machines throwing pumpkins.

Great distances. Glad we got that all the way. What's on the docket for today? Well, today we want to talk about the future. Wow. Well you know, I don't. I don't think just talking about it really is enough. We're tech stuff, right, so we do more than just talk about stuff. We we do thinks. So I suggest we just switch a way back machine to the way forward machine. Let me just hit that switch. Did you check the levels? We'll be fine. We'll be fine. Able

to get there and get back, no problem. Let me just flip the switch first. All right, now, everybody into the machine. I'm talking. I'm talking to the listeners to come on, guys, we're all going together, he says. It's safe. I'm not gonna do you any good if you stay behind while we go up there. All right, Okay, everyone hands and arms inside the way forward machine until it stops. Okay, so let's just set this forward a couple of decades.

Uh right, Um for me, it's the weird sound effects, all right, hang on, hang on, alright, alright, I think we're there now. Um. Let's let me just open the door and make sure that Darren any dinosaurs or anything we didn't excellent Lina, No, no, here we go. Office of the Future. All right, everybody out. Okay, let's take a quick look around and see what we see here. Um. Wow,

giant robots. Yeah, no, it's kind of empty. Yeah. So it turns out the Office of the Future not a whole lot of a lot of people in the office doesn't like it. I guess, um, I guess that telecommuting thing finally paid off. Who would have well apparent, Actually, quite a few people back back from our our home

year of two thousand nine thought it. Uh. It turns out that a lot of executives believed at that time that we were moving towards a telecommuting kind of culture, at least in the Western world when it comes to offices, And part of the reason for that is that technology had reached a point where this is completely within the

realm of possibility. There are a lot of people who telecommute back in two thousand nine, but more so than that, other concerns start to pop up, things like why should a company pay the overhead necessary to maintain a physical office space if every one could actually work out of his or her home or you know a coffee shop just down the street. Yeah, like why pay that electricity bill if you don't have to. I'm guessing if you go down to the factory down the road, there will

still be people there. However, yeah, they will be the ones who are enslaved by the robots to fetch things like w D forty. But in the office it's going to be different. So there are a lot of different technologies that are at play here that can allow office workers to work remotely. Uh. And I don't think we should just jump straight to the to the working from home section. There are stages in between, for example, virtual PCs, virtual PCs. Now, I wanted to talk a bit about

a company called Pano Pano Logic Panel Logic. They sent me a device to look at and I did, and

it's a pretty interesting concept. The idea here is that And let's say that you've got an office and you have a hundred employees, and let's say that each one of those employees needs access to a PC while it work all right, Now, normally you would have to go and purchase at least one PCs, if not a few extra, just in case something breaks down, right, And that means that you have to purchase licenses for all of the software that you're going to be using for those PCs,

assuming that you're using some across the entire office. Yes, you also have to maintain those PCs, so when things break down, you have be ready to fix them. Um, and that means you have a hundred different machines to fix. And unless you've bought them all at the same time, all from the same place, those PCs are gonna have different parts, They're gonna be different models. There may be

different hardware associate with each one. So if one breaks down that that doesn't necessarily mean that you've got a drawer full of replacement parts to fix it immediately. You may have to go and get something new. There are a lot of headaches associated with having lots of physical machines. Now in virtually moving parts. Let's break So what Panos approach is is their suggestion, their their product. Actually what it what does is there? It's two parts. There's a

software component and a hardware component. The software component is yeah, well well it should. So you install the software component on a server, all right, and you compartmentalize that server into uh into virtual PCs. So each virtual PC acts like a real physical PC. It has its own independent applications that run on their own without sapping anything else from any other virtual PC. But they're all running on

one real machine. Yes, one real machine is supplying the processing power and storage capacity for dozens of virtual machines, all right. Then the hardware component is just a simple little station that you plug a you can plug a keyboard into, you can plug a um A monitor into it, and you plug an Ethernet cord into it. Two acts to get the data feed from the server, and you have a power chord. And that's about it. So there's no CPU, there's no disk drive, nothing like that. Everything

is stored on the server. Everything you would access would be on the server. You would have your own individual folders to save things too that are on that exists on your virtual PC. But the information itself exists on the physical server. Now, why would a company want to do this? Oh gee, I don't know. It seems like it would uh save you a lot of trouble if you were trying to, you know, find ways to repair things. As you pointed out, Sure, yeah, that's a big one.

And also would save you a lot of money on licensing software. Yep, that's true too. And um, you know there's there's always the opportunity to save on electricity. That's another good one. It's just cheaper, like each individual device, it would be cheaper than buying a uh are normal what you would normally consider I guess a midpowered machine, mid to high powered machine. It would be less expensive

than that. Storage is simpler. And also if there's a problem, you have one machine to maintain, I mean you can you can do regular maintenance on a server a lot

easier than you can on a hundred different physical machines. Um. Also, like here here's a here's a real world example of where this could come in handy recently, at how Stuff Works, we upgraded part of our software in across the entire office, right, and that required that each of us turn over his or her computer to the I T guy for an hour or more at a time in order to get this software installed on our computers. That's just procedure. It's

company procedure, it's the way we work. So that meant that this one I T Guy had to go through and do the same process over and over on all the different pieces in the office. Now, if you had the virtual PC model, you make that change once on the server and then you then upgrade all the virtual PCs at one time. It's much faster than having to take it piecemeal. So what happens If that one machine

goes down, then you've got a problem. If your one machine goes down, then yeah, all of your access goes down. But I mean that that happens already if you are working on a on a system where um things like you have an Internet server and the Internet server goes down and you're no longer able to access the Internet. I mean that's happened at many places. I can think of one very close to us right now, like the room we're in, so the But yeah, this this can

happen to any office at any time. Now. Granted it does sound scary because it's the idea of Okay, well, now, you've got one point of failure, and um, you know, in the in the instance where you have lots of machines, one machine might fail, But unless it's a critical machine for a specific project, that's maybe not the worst thing in the world that could happen, whereas if that happened

on a centralized point. But the idea being that if you can continue to do maintenance and and monitor this one machine, I mean, if that's what where your I. T. Departments focus is is directed, there's a much better chance of keeping that machine running than a whole bunch of different machines in various states of of use. So yeah, there's a risk versus reward consideration you have to take into account before you move to something like a virtual

PC solution. But on the same by the same token, I mean, you're already running some of those risks in most offices now anyway. It's just that you're now putting more of a burden on that one machine as opposed to you know, a whole bunch of individual ones. But like I've worked in offices where you had to save everything to a network drive. You couldn't you weren't supposed to save anything to your local drive at all, and in that case, if that network drive went down, you

could not access any of your work yep. And I mean that's happened before, So those sort of things, those those things are going to happen. But if you factor that in before you make your decision, it's not so scary if you just take into you know that, all right, sometimes stuff is gonna go wrong and you're gonna have to handle it. But this is kind of a it's also kind of a step toward another kind of computing we've talked about before, which is cloud computing. Yep. Yep.

Now cloud computing, you're no longer even providing the server yep. That's true. Um, that information is all stored somewhere else on company servers, like for example, if you've ever used Google Docs or the upcoming uh Microsoft Office Live. Um, basically, the applications themselves and the files that you create and those applications are all stored on the company's on that company's servers. So Google's massive data warehouses filled filled to

their you know, top with computers. All your files are in there somewhere actually, probably in many many places, since you many many backups. Um. But yeah, that's all. That's all done. Yeah, I mean that's all done with cloud computing. So and it's out there somewhere. The interesting thing here is that, you know, again you have to ask yourself the question why would any company move to this? And it comes down to cost. I mean by moving your

your processing and storage loads off site. Uh. As long as the cost of the service is lower than the cost it would take you to purchase and maintain your own equipment, that's going to seem like a very attractive alternative for companies. Uh. But there are some big hurdles to get past. The biggest one, I think is the whole perception of how reliable are cloud computing services. Yeah,

and that's taken some meetings lately to you. Yeah, in the in bet well lately being back in two thousand nine, in the future now, so years ago, back in two thousand nine, and our personal timeline right right, Yeah, this is hard. I gotta think in four dimensions. I usually

manage one and a half. But the Yeah, so back in two thousand nine, you know, back when are we all were just a few minutes ago, the biggest problems were things like Google Gmail going down or Google Apps going down or T Mobile losing all the side Mobile didn't do that, except it wasn't Mobile and Mobile gets T Mobile gets the worst of that deal because not only were they not responsible for the the service outage and we're talking about the Sidekick service outage, the Danger

servers that went down, not only was T Mobile not responsible for that, but they also get the blame for it because the T Mobile name is on that Sidekick device. Yes, and uh so everybody is angry at T Mobile, even though Microsoft is the one that owns the Danger servers. At any rate, when you can take the blame for someone else's problem, yeah, you gotta man. You gotta love being Microsoft in that situation. Except the savvy people, of course,

already know the difference. It's just whether the general public is aware of it. But that's that's the problem, right. There's this perception that if you entrust your data to some other service and something goes wrong, uh, then you're

you're totally up the creek. And I think the biggest obstacle for most people is a sense of control because these problems do pop up in offices right now under just local you know services, So your local servers at your office the ones that are actually physically in your

building possibly could go down and it affects your entire office. Um, but you that feels different than if it were in someone else's control, like in Google's control, because at least then you can be the one standing in the room looking at all these machines that aren't blinking lights like they're supposed to and scream profanity if you wish, Whereas if it's in Google's building, you have no idea if anyone is screaming profanity or even in the general vicinity

of the computers that aren't working. I mean, it's a safe bet. I don't know about the screaming profanity part. I'm not really aware of that in Google's culture. But the point being that without those those machines being on your physical premises you you lose that sense of control and it's harder to entrust your your data and your processing power to another party. But this is the future.

We've gotten past that because obviously companies have managed to create UH services that are both secure and reliable, or at least secure enough and reliable enough and cheap enough for companies to say, you know what, we're gonna go with this because it's gonna save us more money in the long run. So what else has made the Office of the future become a non localized, non geographic you know,

uh entity. I mean, now we no longer have these massive offices filled with people screaming and yelling at each other and typewriters clacking and oh wait, I'm thinking I took that trip to the nineteen twenties the other day. I'm thinking of you know, I think those big screens over there might have something to do with it. Oh yeah, well that that would have something to do with it, because the you know, of course, that technology is getting cheaper and cheaper every year. Yes, we're at least in

two thousand nine, Yes, back in two thousand nine. By now it's you know, pretty much commonlies. You know. Well, I think the pennies back in so, you know, during

that whole Mayan thing, yea, anyway, yeah, um yeah. Actually the telepresence idea Cisco um, you know, was big into that back in two thousand nine, about the idea that you can immerse yourself in um being in a meeting, in a virtual situation with the right kind of camera and having the large enough screen you feel like you're actually right in front of the person and talking to them, um, which was a pretty neat way of making it possible to uh, to communicate with other people, because that was

the big thing about working in person when you had to be in an office building like this giant, empty one that we're in now. Uh, you know, well, what are you gonna do. You don't get any face time with anybody, You don't get the opportunity to make your point in person. But now you don't need to because you have you know this uh, this conferencing technology that allows you to do that, and you know it's all free with this. These ads supported voice over Internet protocol

services and there's tons of them now. And not only that, but I think culturally the shift started where people began to place less and less importance on that in person meeting. UM. I mean, part of it was technlogy was allowing for alternatives, and part of it's just this interesting shift where people are becoming more comfortable with virtual spaces, with communicating over various forms of Internet or electronic uh methods. So let's

talk about also collaboration. Collaboration is much easier in the future than it was, you know, in two thousand nine and and far easier than back and when I started working in an office environment, like when Google Wave revolutionized office communications. Sure, because let's let's think back to the early days of my career. Because this way I can I can kind of step through how collaboration has changed. Are No, no, we're not We're not going to get

in the machine. I'm just gonna tell you about it. So the machine is just gonna stay right there. We're just gonna stay in this building. No one wander off. I see some of you going toward the windows. Just be careful, okay, alright, So anyway, the back when I started work, it was really hard to collaborate with other people because in order to do any sort of collaboration I had to create a document on my machine. I then had to email it or put it up on

a server for someone else. They would pull a copy of that document onto their machine make changes. Then they'd have to save that copy back either to a centralized server or email it to me. And now you've got multiple copies of the same document kind of floating around. It just made it really messy and difficult to keep track.

Ye skip ahead, you got you started getting things like Google Docs, where now you've got a centralized document creation source, like you can go to Google Docs, create a document, and you can invite other people to come into that document and make edits, and you can create a unified

effort in creating this document without making extra copies. Move on to Google Wave, which incorporates not just collaboration, but real time collaboration, where you can actually see people making changes in real time and you can comment on them. You can have a discussion at that moment within the document itself if you wanted to and discuss what should and should not go in there. Yeah, it was, it was.

It was a little buggy, you know, it didn't necessarily keep up with all your waves and and you didn't have that many applications. But now now there's practically everything available on Google Wave. You can do video conferencing, you can create documents, you can create presentations, you can do pretty much all the basic Microsoft kind of office things that a lot of officers did earlier. And what's really interesting is that, of course Google Wave is not the

only solution. I think it it really led a revolution in how we communicate online. So really the there are tons of different applications, not just Googles. I mean, Google's, of course, is the oldest one, so that's the one we talk about. But obviously other companies have come out with their own versions of this kind of software. Yeah yeah, and just just wasn't anticipating the whole you know, Twitter

buying Google things. Yeah, that really surprised me too. Yeah. Anyway, also, you know, um, well, we won't get into it at any rate. So somebody's gonna you know, look, listen to this here, that much of it and freak out. Well, clearly they didn't give in the machine with us at the beginning. If they did, they'd see what we're talking about. So here here's something some other things to consider about the office. Wow, what does that here? Yeah, you know

what's because it's big empty building, right. Okay, So if we do move to more telecommuting, as this version of the future has shown us, now, granted we gotta remember futures they branch off. We may just be in one possible future. We didn't go to the one where the robots rule us. So, I mean there are a lot of different choices. Well I haven't looked out the window, tell you the truth. So but assuming that that this does hold true and that we no longer have the

need to create a geographic location for our office. Like let's say, a lot of offices now they allow their employees to log in from wherever they are to uh to contribute to the company. What happens to all the office buildings, Well, you know, they they're really nice planters. Yeah, that's that's one of the things. I mean, it's one of those questions that you think, why are you even asking, and you think, well, no, this is a legitimate question.

If what are all the people going to do with those Yeah, you've got you've got these massive buildings, like we're we're in a pretty tall building in Atlanta. And can you imagine if if more offices moved to a telecommuting uh atmosphere back in two thousand nine. Yeah, let's assume that offices do find that telecommuting does work, that employees are justice productive if they work remotely as they

would be if they worked in the office. They gonna say more money by having a virtual space as opposed to a physical space. All of those real estate owners who own these buildings are going to be in trouble, I mean, And then follow the next step, what happens to cities. If suddenly you have all these abandoned buildings in the middle, it could turn into another city that I won't mention on this podcast. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna at any rate you end up with a

lot of empty buildings. That's actually a big trouble problem. And another legitimate concern that people have about the possibility of telecommuting is the impact it would have on I T departments. Yeah, that that does seem like it would be a problem. Well, it depends on what what what

is used to deliver computing services now too. I mean, if it's centralized as you suggested earlier with virtual machines, uh, then there's probably very little that's going to need to be done in terms of regular maintenance at the at the person's house. Now, of course, you know something is

an actual physical break. You know, somebody needs to replace a monitor for example, Right, But I think in that I think in these cases like let's assume let's let's take the test case of an office of the future, and let's say, okay, let's say that they have given all employees a very thin client to work with, as there their work machine. So by thin client, I mean that it does not have a very powerful process, or

it doesn't have very much storage space. If anything, it pretty much has a screen and a keyboard and interface with which you can use too, or which you can use to access the services that you need to do your job. Assuming someone successfully resurrects that idea. Yes, netbooks, dude, they're already back there in two thousand nine. Okay, that idea was already alive before we got into the machine. So you have a thin client that can access these these things, or maybe even a company allows you to

use your own machine. I think that would be a little more problematic because then you're getting into like intellectual property issues. It's not even people's preferences. It's really more of a question of I don't want you to have you have office property on your personal machine. Yeah, yeah, well that and I was thinking more along lines of well, you bought this thing over here, and he bought that thing over there, and she bought that thing over there,

and none of them are compatible with one another. Right, So I think the thin client is probably the most the most logical approach because it's going to be cheap, and it's going to be easy to replace if it breaks.

And then the same Office of the Future which has given out all these these thin clients to employees some netbooks or whatever they whatever format they take um and then if one breaks, they have a contract with an independent I T department that can support this stuff, and they do it on a case by case basis, which is cheaper than supporting an I T department on your own until you get to a certain scale. I assume if you got to an office that was truly enormous,

then you would want your own I T department. But otherwise I don't think you would need to. You would just contract out to to an independent company. And because all of your your source, your your storage, and your processing power if you're gone to cloud computing, because all of that is now on someone else's property. They're the ones who are providing I T support. They're the ones who have the I T department. You don't have to

support that anymore. Which sounds great to the companies, it's scary as heck to the I T professionals out there, because yeah, you know, think about the idea being that, well, now there's there's not as big a need for as many i T professionals. You just need the number to look overlooked, you know, oversee the servers, not necessarily all the machines inside a big office. So that can mean that I T professionals could see jobs get growing more and more scarce and uh be a much more com

out of the field. And um and that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, there are people who have developed put in years and years of work in I T fields and have a ton of expertise who may have problems finding a job in the future because there just aren't as many out there to be had, even though we've moved to a much higher tech world. It's kind of a weird paradox. It is kind of strange

when you think about it. Um. So, one of the things that I really like about the Office of the Future is the whole uh how it adjusts to you being there sort of you know, because that whole R F I D thing right was the first generation of how you know, it could identify who you are, and of course as soon as you walk into the room and could set the temperature to the right level and

the lighting to the to the right ambiance. Um, you know, personally, I enjoy how we do our podcasts in their candlelit room. It's very very pleasant, very very calming. Um, you know, not everybody functions well in that kind of an environment. And not only that, but then you have things like augmented reality layers that you can put on top of your various interfaces. So let's say you do have a

teleconferencing meeting with someone. Not only do you see that person's image on your computer, you know, and only do you see live video, but you might see real time stats popping up, things like the person who's you know that they're from a different company. You start seeing stock information popping up, you start seeing links to news stories.

This could be both good and bad, because you know, you don't necessarily want the person you're meeting with to be reading the latest news about you and your company while you're trying to talk with him. But it's something that we have to deal with in the future. Yeah, so, uh, I really want to strike a deal with you. What? Um, yeah, you know what now that you mentioned, thank you very much for the offer, We'll be I gotta go. Yeah,

what happened exactly? So did you do? So? The Office of the Future is is definitely a different place than back in two thousand nine. I mean even back in our office. We do occasionally telework back in two thousand nine, but it's it's not it's more the exception than the rule. Yeah, we still come into the office most of the time, and you know, we we work there in how Stuff Works dot com And as you imagine, just imagine, you know, it's a big laboratory filled with bubble bubbling beakers and

machines that go ping, just like in your imagination. It's exactly like that. It's not like a giant room filled with cubicles with people typing away quietly, everyone wearing headphones. It's not like that at all. No, not in the least. Okay, that's because we're sort of borderline future. Uh sadly, No, that it really is more like a bunch of people saying in a big room will make me want to

go back to the past again. Well, mostly I'm saying it so that people don't want to show up and tour our office because there's really not much to see. I mean, tons of intelligent people working, which is cool, but you can find that in other places. So are we are we all done here in the future of talking about the fact that in the future there's really no such thing as a physical office anymore. Well then,

all right, everyone, pile back in here. I'm gonna I'm gonna flip the switch back to the way back machine. Hang on, all right, everyone, get in. Come on, no stragglers, don't want to leave anyone, Come on, come on, all right, let's go. All right, let's push the button. Chris, I can't reach it from me. All right, all right, all right, back in good old two thousand. Oh, where's Billy. That's fine, probably probably doesn't matter. And seriously, we have to get

out of there because somebody is really inconsiderate. Okay, everyone out, come on. It's kind of uffing in here now. All right. Wow, that that's a first for tech stuff, right there, my friends, Uh, time trouble, I mean, not the not the flahlence joke. Um. So, I hope you guys learned something about the Office of the future. It really is kind of an interesting thing to think about, you know. It definitely has some pretty

wide ranging consequences. Now, granted, if Kurt Swell is correct, we won't have to deal with that for very long because three days after the Office of the Future arrives, the robots will take over pretty much, so you know, enjoy those three days of telecommuting, and then um say hello to your android overlords. Hello, So, um, are you ready to move on to a little listener mail? I am indeed, so let's go to listener mail. This comes

from Kyle, who is a help desk support specialist. Kyle, I hope we didn't scare you with the Office of the Future, he says. I've spent this morning catching up on some tech stuff podcasts and just listen to the Apple Tablet Cast. You guys made a joke about Steve Jobs not returning your calls, which surprised me because it turns out Steve Jobs actually does return all sorts of calls from the general public. A friend of mine has several Apple devices in his house, including an iPod Touch.

He'd had a horrible time with it, had spent it, had been sent in for repairs multiple times, and always come back still broken. So he wrote a letter to Jobs and copied all twenty seven members of Apple's board of directors. About two weeks later, his cell phone rings. Steve Jobs actually called him directly to apologize for all the trouble he'd had and told him they would send him a new iPod Touch second generation. His broken one was a first generation and one of the new iPod

nanos with the camera. They only spoke for a couple of minutes, but still, how often does someone get a call from the CEO of a fortune company? Like I said, I know you were just making a joke, but maybe you should try giving him a call. He might even tell you about their secret plans to take over the world with their new tablet ile. Um. Well, first of all, Kyle, thanks for writing. That's a really cool story that she told.

I think that's really interesting, and I guess that might be why Forbes called him the the CEO of the was it the decade? Wow? So good on you, Mr Jobs. I'm still a little too intimidated to actually call him. Um, I think you'd fire me? Yeah, I don't even work for I think he would hire me, fire me, and then yeah, go out and go about his business. Um No. I I greatly respect what he's done. I fear him, not in the same way I fear Balmer. Balmber makes

me physically afraid Jobs. It's more of a psychological thing, and I think that's probably warranted at any rate. If any of you out there have any comments you want to make, suggestions, questions, criticisms, that sort of thing, you can write us. Our email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. And remember you can watch us live every Tuesday afternoon at one pm Eastern. That's over at the the how stupp works dot com blogs. Just go to how stup works dot com. Look on

the right side. You'll see the links to the blogs. You can check it out there and see tech stuff Live and see what Chris and I look like when we're making puns in person. And uh, don't forget to watch for some punkin chunking. That's right, chunking. Eyes open, And until next time, we'll talk to you guys again

really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you