No more offices

Scenario 3

• Technical Developments
• Traffic
• Real Estate
• CO2 Taxes

This scenario evaluates the factors which may influence the office evolution in the next 12 years (to 2020) and reaches an amazing scenario: there will be no office any more in 2020. The reasons will be illustrated as follows:

Technical Developments

With the development of technology in 2020, especially the leverage of internet speed, liability and interoperability, the world is becoming smaller and smaller and almost everything could be done very easily through the Internet.

In detail, deriving from the outstanding performance of Quantum Internet and Quantum Mainframes, both the information processing speed and the internet transfer speed would be boosted to an incredible new level. Enabled by this technology and other factors like fruitful research results, the encryption technologies would be improved as well. In this way, the Internet security would be enhanced and guaranteed.

Furthermore, with the introduction future versions of Web and the technologies which allows applications to be invoked in any platform, from Windows to UNIX and Linux, from PDAs to mobile phones, the traditional works which have to be done in the offices could be done everywhere in a easy way.

Besides the reasons above, because of the development of technologies, the inter-communication of different departments of international companies would become more and more frequent. And this means that, the companies’ remote support system would become more and more mature and secure. In this way, the companies’ ICT infrastructures also enable the employees to work at home.

Traffic

The chart on the right shows that the number of automobiles is continuously increasing in the latest 50 years. Furthermore, considering the rise of new dense-populated power like China and India, we may say that, this number could be up to 80 million.

In this way, the automobile related problems would show up in the populated area, such as traffic jam and accidents, though these problems have already been very serious in metropolitans these days. Obviously, in the high populated area, the government also will be aware of these problems and try to solve them. A very efficient way to solve this is to improve the taxes for automobiles, and thus, the cost to travel to the office would be increased, though public transports may decrease this influence effect.

Furthermore, if we consider the global warm mainly cause by automobile emissions, which, many experts claim that will lead to the end of human race, or the shortage of petroleum, another critical factor for the usage of automobiles, both the government will definitely increase tax for using automobiles and the continuous increasing petroleum prices, the cost to go to the office will definitely higher and higher, and this would be another push force for the declining number of office in the future.

Knowledge Sharing Platform

The knowledge sharing platform or system has been established. Together with the easy access to the internet and other technical innovation, there is mere need to have a physical office with exactly the same function to gather, share and deal with the corporate information to do the business.

Real Estate

In line with the booming world’s population, together with changing tax policy on property, the commercial real estate has reached the sky-high prices which become unaffordable for the small and medium companies. The difference between the concept of home and office for young professional will become vague. As when the company recruits the young generations, company will provide them with their “dormitory” in the past location of the office building.

Besides, international business involves cooperation among lots of countries with relatively equal importance, together with the issue of time zones, the contributions from establishing and maintaining more offices across the global is not obvious as in the past.

Furthermore, the increased tax burden for building and renting a commercial building come at a difficult time for the property industry. The government ends its policy of granting long-term tax relief to owners of commercial buildings. The commercial-property owners, like CBD, switch to rent the meeting and conference rooms for the business company at their own needs based. All this events leads to the trend of no more office.

Tax on CO2

Authority grant carbon credits for both company and individual, intends to reduce the carbon-dioxide emissions. Under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM, company have to buy CDM credit which fetches around $50 high to emit a ton of CO2.

At the meantime, oil consumers riled by soaring fuel costs will face far worse in 2020 as factors ranging from unrest in countries to slumping production. OPEC has kept its production target almost unchanged for a long period and has rebuffed calls for more supply even though crude prices has doubled or even tripled compared to 2005. This put further strain on auto makers, airlines and utilities, and which all finally switch to the consumers. Therefore, the traffic on the road and air is heavily reduced, which leads to more intense use of the virtual platforms for operating on the net..