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Nov 7, 2008 @ 11:37 
It is always very inspirational to share ideas with likeminded people. As we were discussing with my friends Selim, Refik and Elif; we came to a really interesting point: What will life be like in the future?
Obviously we were looking at it from an IT perspective, but especially from a mobile perspective. Here is a projection by Ian Sands, director of envisioning at Microsoft Office Labs. This projection is a lot similar to what we thought, but we have our differences.
To begin with, there will not be a separate business life or personal life in the future. Business life will penetrate into our personal lives even more, or vice versa, as we experience the birth of it today with our mobile phones (Blackberry, PDA, iPhone etc…). As a result of this the borders of these two worlds will fade out. So the life will be a nice blend of the business life and personal life.
How this will affect the working conditions? Consider 50 years ago, people had been working for a company nearly for their whole life. However in today’s world people need a change, seek for a better job or start their companies (it is much easier to launch a startup today!) So it came to the point which people work for at least 5-6 different companies throughout their lives. So what about the future? Why would I work for only one company? Why would only one company benefit from my experience?
Having said that, in the future a person can work for company A for Monday to Wednesday, be a consultant for company B on Thursdays and so on… Moreover, there will be no weekdays or weekends, since there is no workdays or holidays. There will only be hours you live and, you will decide when and how to work or not to work. At home or office? Wait, will there be an office in the future, or home? Depending on what you would like to do, anywhere in the world can be your office or home because you will have all the basic means necessary for anything you want to do. It will be like all people working as freelancers.
Hypothetically, all of the people will have a brand of their own. What this means is that I as a person will not be a telecommunications engineer anymore, I will be “Goktug Gedik“, as my company name, working for myself and/or serving other companies.
Sounds like a chaos, right? This is the point where technology fills the gap. Today’s technology, communication tools are not sophisticated enough to handle this kind of life. A visual phone will never replace a real face-to-face meeting. However, there will be new tools, new technology to replace that. The change has already begun with the social services like Facebook or Twitter. Not only in personal lives, but also for enterprises social communication services have also been quite popular, just like the Yammer, which is like an enterprise version of Twitter.
There will be new tools and services for people to communicate, share and interact in such world without being in a chaos. It is hard to predict those tools, but there is one thing for sure about them: People will choose which tools are good and helpful, and which are not. They will be shaped with the change in our lifestyles, just like natural selection.
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