Office-less companies.

This is more than just faster downloads.

Take one small business sector:  Austin is home to around 40 computer games companies - I’m guessing 4,000 to 6,000 people work in that industry and almost 100% of them could work from home.  Allow those people to work from home with the ability to communicate with co-workers using high quality video links and realtime desktop mirroring and cloud computing and most of them won’t need to drive to work.  Taking thousands of vehicles off the road and making big energy and CO2 emissions savings is a smart idea.  Most people leave heating and air conditioners running in their homes all day anyway so if companies can get away with vastly smaller offices then there will be energy savings there too.

Multiply this by all of the office jobs in Austin and the savings are enormous.

It won’t be enough to simply get Google’s networking in here though - that’s just the catalyst.

We need the City council to offer incentives to companies who have people work at home (say) 4 days out of every 5.  Maybe offer equipment grants for things like web cameras - put together cheap or even free/OpenSourced communications tool bundles - start a management education campaign to convince managers that this can be good for their companies.  Run community education classes for workers to learn to use how all of this stuff and how to avoid the distractions of working from home.  Find creative ways for workers to maintain a sense of “belonging” even when they don’t share a physical space.  Promote local “cloud computing” services for companies to use (I’m sure Google could help with that).

We want to make Austin a “green” city - and this is one huge way to make that happen.

Posted: March 10, 2010: 12:17 PM