[derefr]

> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.

I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.

In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something.

At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have.

It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)

[koboll]

>They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.

Well, this makes sense, since IBM is effectively a consulting firm now. This is how all consulting firms operate -- there are tons of these all over the place in DC.

[axlee]

Yes, sounds exactly like what McKinsey or Bain are doing.

[ViViDboarder]

IBM calls it hotelling. You can book a desk and check in at any office.

[texasbigdata]

Sounds good. Who plugs in your monitors and other tools? :)

[infogulch]

How about a standard 2-monitor+HID setup at each station, that you connect to with your company issued laptop via a single usb-c cable?

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’d like to see a solution like the Smart Card-based Sun Ray become standard in offices. Pull up to any client terminal, swipe a card and get access to your desktop as you left it. Get a cheap laptop for remote access.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure you really need that anymore. I can do 95% of my work from a Chromebook. Even if you need to do more locally a laptop works for most people without a Sun Ray type system (which can also be done through some cloud offerings).

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The advantage of working primarily on a thin client is that turning off the client doesn’t stop the computation. Also, the worst part of modern IT tech is messing with projectors/keyboards/etc. for presentations and meetings. I’d much rather swipe my card at the projector and have my current desktop automagically broadcast to the projector. (AirPlay is pretty close to this, I guess).

Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company

[andylynch]

We have something like that. It works pretty well, and when COVID hit it became a game changer.

I liked deploying Sun Rays back in the day too.

[derefr]

To actually answer your question — these coworking spaces do have IT staff. They’re mostly responsible for maintaining the shared infrastructure, but they’ll help you out with your needs as well, if you ask. If you reserve a cube for months at a time, you can certainly bring in a full workstation setup, and they’ll help you to wire it up. (Not that you’d need much help; both power and Ethernet drops are right there for the taking.)

It’s really the socialism to WeWork’s capitalism: because everyone there is, in the end, working for the same employer, enabling the people who come to work there to succeed at their jobs is part of the job-description of the stationed office staff. They aren’t just exchanging money for doing the letter-of-the-law of your SLA contract with them, with your job as an opaque thing that takes up a room. Office staff are more like a college librarian is to a college student: a resource paid to help however they can.

[chrisseaton]

The monitor stays on your desk.

Who plugs it in? How hard is it to plug in a USB cable to your laptop that you need to ask who’s doing it?

[whoisburbansky]

Isn't that exactly what WeWork's business model was?

[marta_morena_28]

Yes except that IBM has revenue it generates from people (not) being there, while WeWork only loses money :D.

[fragmede]

I'm a bit ignorant of IBMs business model given how many times they've changed businesses. What you're saying is that IBM has a business that generates revenue, but that business continues to exist (and generate revenue) despite people not actively being at a desk, not that IBM has somehow managed to find a way to make money from empty desks, right?

WeWork makes more money from an oversubscription model, and thus could also make money from desks being unused. (Have 10 desks, rent out "13", and hope that all 13 people don't need desks at the same time).

[danielhlockard]

Yes, except this is private to IBM employees. Helpful when you're in an industry with a lot of regulatory / compliance oversight.

[silentsea90]

All of us naysayers failed to appreciate the foresight that Mr Neumann and Softbank displayed. Joke's on us :D

[loganfrederick]

The fundamentals were not bad ideas. Regus has been doing things similar to WeWork for decades.

Neumann committing fraud, poor cash management, and self-dealing conflicts of interest are what killed WeWork. Not the coworking space concept.

[908B64B197]

What I don't understand is the multiples at which WeWork was trading.

I could definitely understand the business model (it's cloud computing for real-estate!) and especially cool for remote/business travelers since from what I understand it was rather easy for a WeWork user to use any of their facilities.

[xapata]

People said the same thing about AWS: "Hardware is a commodity, how can they possibly turn a profit renting out hardware?"

[908B64B197]

It's more that they bill by the capacity used and it's possible to cancel at any time.

Same way a WeWork is more expensive than renting your own real estate but it's probably simpler than getting into a long term lease. Plus if your startup has to scale up WeWork can accommodate, unlike your typical office rental.

[rtx]

You can, if you think of it like a Ponzi scheme.

[Wowfunhappy]

The pandemic also would have hit them pretty hard had they not semi-collapsed a few months before.

[asdff]

Sorta, but WeWork would be like a middle man parasite compared to leasing directly from the landlord. So not nearly as efficient.

[ghaff]

There's probably some management company handling the space in any case.

[keiferski]

Isn't this basically the same thing as Regus?

[irjustin]

This is how large consulting firms work since the teams are so fluid.

[im3w1l]

If we continue the metaphor they should sell excess capacity to other companies with a spot price.