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Companies Move Away From Cubicle Culture
Makarand writes "According to this Mercury News article companies are
freeing employees from
their cubicles to save on corporate real estate costs. By eliminating the
need for offices for thousands of employees they are reducing their building
needs by thousands of square feet.
Employees now work in shared areas or from home or elsewhere outside the traditional cubicle.
Those who prove to be unproductive when they have to share space with others risk getting fired. This trend is expected
to accelerate
as wireless technologies are making workers more mobile and capable of working from anywhere.
About 13000 of Sun Microsystems' 35000 employees working in Santa Clara (CA) currently lack offices."
And here I thought moving away from cubicles would be a GOOD thing. Sharing a room with 5 other people doesn't make ANYONE productive. I've done it. It just doesn't work.
No, this isn't a troll, or a fanboy comment. Think about it.
Sun employees are able to work from anywhere they site because Sun uses the X Window System -- famous for remotability of applications. You can truly call up any application from any location and it runs. Your home directory is, quite literally, your desktop.
Not so easy for Windows-using companies. Yes, I know all about Terminal Services. I deploy it for customers all the time, and therefore I know that it isn't nearly flexible enough for this type of work. Can you have lots of different apps running from lots of different hosts on your screen at the same time? Maybe, but you have to deal with each of them running in a 'desktop-in-a-window'. Forget about cutting and pasting between them. And god forbid the user saves something to their 'C drive' and tries to pull it up in another application.
Windows users and Windows applications think very much inside the 'My Computer' mindset. Not only is it the name of the little icon, but it's the way the whole framework is set up. Attempts to free Windows users from a single desktop almost always fail. I've seen it. People move to a different computer and wonder where that file they saved is. They wonder what happened to their bookmarks, or some other obscure setting they selected. Truly, the only way to get Windows users to roam effectively is to give them all laptops.
Unix and Linux users, on the other hand, are truly free to roam. Case in point: Largo, Florida. Remember the architecture they described? Every time they deploy a new application, they bring online a server to run it from. Then they have a few integration servers coordinating the desktop framework and firing up those apps, wherever they live, and sending them to the desktops, wherever the user happens to be. You log on to any computer and your desktop is there. And since Unix/Linux has been saving user preferences and user files in your home directory for three decades, as long as you have the same home directory NFS-mounted everywhere, you're good to go. I've deployed this, too, and I can attest that it works beautifully.
Want to ditch the cubicle farm? Ditch Windows first.
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