A prediction I made some years ago was that in time many office buildings would become empty. People thought I was crazy, and that it was a sure thing investment.
My thinking was information technology is step by step taking over the management of information in the organization. You've got to remember in the 1970's large corporations needed office towers each floor full of rows of cubicles, each cubicle having an office drone. And each drone was updating part of the information of the corporation. Such as forms in triplicate, and each being dutifully filed. With ledgers being updated.
Today most of the information is handled by servers, or even server farms. Each server can do into the billions of operations a second. So we don't need so many office drones anymore. Naturally in the government and banks they still have just as many, actually more drones. But in the competitive parts of the economy, they have been forced to gradually eliminate the drones.
For example say an area of the company needed 500 drones managing the information. Well they also then need building maintenance, management, HR, secretaries, etc.. Now say they need 25 drones to handle it. And a couple manager. Well somewhere in the country the corporation would have rented a large space to house all the cubicle drones.
No comments:
Post a Comment