Airbnb, a San Franciscan start-up company, has been able to refrain from leasing office space because of the advancements in social networking technology.
The company has been operating from a managing director’s apartment, and has no need to acquire actual offices because most of their work is done online.
Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, said, "Today, companies are fundamentally less corporate." This has been possible due to the advancements in virtual desktops in the last few years.
Although an unforgiving economy has made rental prices exceedingly high, the benefits of Web 2.0 technology, smartphones, social media sites, blogs, Skype, instant messages and virtual desktops has made not having an office not such a big problem.
The Silicon Valley Index has reported that the office vacancy rates were 33% lower in 2008, and have increased ever since. This corresponds with the surge of web based solutions.
Surprisingly this statistic has not had any impact on rental prices, which have stayed steady at $27.12 to $32.88 per square foot.
Daniel Pink, an author on working habits, said “Some of it is cyclical — people are running lean operations to save money.”
"But technology is enabling more of it. Someone's iPhone has as much computing power as companies had 30 years ago."
Tate Holt, CEO of WorkingPoint, an internet solutions company, has said that 60% of their clients no longer have or need office space. The internet solutions that are currently available have made offices completely unnecessary.
With such a high figure it is clear that virtual desktops can be an appropriate alternative to the use of office space.
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