Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

One of the other ramifications of constant business connectedness, made possible by new and innovative hardware and cloud-based software, should be a positive effect on the environment. For openers, if you have everything you need to do your job at your fingertips and completely portable, why do you need an office?

The answer is, in most cases, you don't. Any reasonable business computing paradigm of the future will include provisions for Web meetings, and I think we can plan on spending a lot of time in them. Some things never change. But you won't have to drag yourself down to the office to participate. Call in from where you are, with full audio, video and collaboration functionality. You will still be able to keep track of how bald your boss is getting. And if you don't need an office, we can stop using resources to keep two places (home and office) climate conditioned for you.

If you don't need a physical presence in the office, you don't need to get there, either. So we can quit wasting resources on commuting. No more wasted time, no more wasted barrels of oil, no more everyday travel hassle. At the same time, these smaller computing devices use a lot less power, and we may be able to make do with solar, getting your computing completely off the grid.

Yes, I know that we need to re-educate bosses and owners. They need to learn that performance metrics are what is important, not seat time in a central office chair. And with our new constant business connectedness potential, our performance metrics can go through the roof while we work fewer hours per day. We can have the best of both worlds by just using the technology appropriately.

The reality is that only time you really need to be in the same physical location as most of you co-workers is at the regular company retreats, which are not held in an office anyway. Some face time is required for people to feel like they are members of the team. But we need to stop wasting copious amounts of resources for every office worker on the planet just to satisfy the paranoia and control urges of the boss. We can stick it to the man by doing our jobs efficiently and saving the planet at the same time.