Apple Goes Mobile

With the recent announcement by Apple that the .Mac platform is morphing into the new MobileMe system, I think I am going to make a conscious choice to work at home from now on.  MobileMe is a push technology that offers your email, calendar, contacts and files all to your PC, Mac, iPod or iPhone.  OK, we are all familiar with how Microsoft Exchange pushes our email to our Blackberry or Microsoft smartphone, so this is not a new idea in itself. You just need to buy a server, hire your administrators, set up your domains, build out Exchange and then buy the seats for Outlook; simple.  Another thing that really excites me about this is that this technology is open to anyone who wants to buy it for themselves at the $99 a year price. On Apple’s MobileMe you use the email reader you are happy with or the platform’s built-in email application on me.com.  With this being a paid service from Apple there are no ads on me.com, which makes me wonder what Google’s Gmail will do to up the ante? Another question this begs an answer for is how long can the CEO of Google sit on the board at Apple?

MobileMe is supposed to release tomorrow night at 8PM, which comes just before the release of the second generation iPhone on July 11th.

Sun’s Telework Study

Sun Microsystems has been allowing workers to utilize non-traditional working environments for years.  With 56% of their workforce, some 19,000 employees, either working from home or in a flexible office, Sun is obviously not dabbling with this idea, but has embraced this as a productivity enabling ideology.  Until now Sun only hinted that this was also about the carbon footprint and energy savings, but according to a recent study Sun found that powering office equipment accounted for only 1.7% of the employees total carbon footprint while the commute itself was 98%.  By eliminating commuting by 2.5 days per week, employees reduce their energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 kilowatt hours each year. Multiply that by the 19,000 people Sun has working from home and you see a massive savings.  Bravo Sun.

Moving more and more of our daily grind to the cloud is a good idea in my book.  Sun already sells its’ servers as an eco-friendly solution, the argument is that as you spin up more services or you upgrade existing in-house applications, you move them to a hosted service, or at least host them on a server designed to require less energy. This goes hand in hand with what Scott has been preaching as well: that we are rapidly moving into a new era of online productivity.  With companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Sun all offering new ways to push the work load from the corporate server room to the distributed cloud of the Internet we will also see a shift how we view the office as well.

Perhaps I need to start a chain of Wi-Fi enabled offices that cater to young professionals.  I could sell expensive coffee and offer comfortable seating with places to plug in all of those gadgets too.   I think I might be on to something with this…

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Working at home,

Matt