Offices in the Future

We've posted before about shared office spaces. Workers who traffic in information -- particularly those in the programming and design world -- sometimes use office spaces in an itinerant fashion. They occasionally need a workstation, so rent a space for a few hours, then move on. Some programmers set up shop in cafés or in a park on a sunny day. The point being that in a wireless/mobile world, location doesn't matter as much as it once did. So why have an office at all? Why even have your own computer -- or at least a desktop PC? Perhaps the future will be a world littered with access points and increasingly capable mobile devices, with all data and most apps in the cloud. You log in to your work space, access your data storage, interact with co-workers remotely and so on. For some people that world is pretty much here. The rationale for dingy office cubicles finally starts to evaporate. Once corporates sniff the potential savings, the logic may become unassailable.