The Internet is the computer

With its Premier Edition, Google Apps may make the virtual workplace a reality for larger corporations. Other concerns, like Yahoo and BlueTie, have been offering virtual corporation email and more for some time.several online office suites, like Google Apps, and WebOS applications, are ready to take it to the next level.

Undoubtedly, some organizations might hesitate at keeping essential records on someone else’s hardware. But, realistically, most hosting services have better backup procedures that most corporate houses. Outfits like BlueTie, Yahoo, and Google are definitely leaders in uptime services and disaster recovery planning.

I daresay that if all the records in New Orleans had been stored on the Googleplex, we would not have lost so much data to Katrina. And, that’s something to think about. We like to fret about terrorist attacks, but year-after-year, we lose much more to natural disasters. The more data we have backed up on redundant virtual systems, the less data we will lose the next time a flood, quake, or hurricane strikes. Lest we forget, the original internet was designed to survive a nuclear disaster.

And inch by inch, the Internet is becoming omnipresent. We can already access the Internet from anywhere we can get cell reception. I’ve watched geeks blog from conferences in real time by hooking a laptop up to a cell phone. Right now, that kind of connectivity is an additional fee that most of us don’t want to pay, but that will change.

Online banking is already old-hat, for both personal and business use. My business account at HSBC is so secure that I can barely use it myself. My username and passwords are longer than usual, and I have to get a magic number from a LCD dongle on every login. At one point, I needed my password reset, and I had to present an affidavit to the local branch. (Really, I did!) Though, I suppose a Klingon-secure bank account is not a bad thing :)

I flew to Milwaukee in January to host a training course, and I was pleased to find free wifi connectivity in every airport along the way, including our own itsy-bitsy Rochester International. If I had brought my HSBC dongle, I could have even done some banking!

Today, running your business over the Internet is almost inescapable. If you make payroll deductions, you may even be compelled to deposit withholdings online.

Cell phones too are almost inescapable. It was one thing when single adults did without landlines, but now the nuclear family next door is doing the same. I have friends with a teenage son that don’t have a home phone: just three cell phones. We’d consider doing the same, but we have a Time Warner “all in one account”, so the home phone doesn’t cost much more. It’s not even a real landline. It’s telephony-over-cable-over-Internet. But, hey, the long distance is free!

(Just who is Jack Bauer’s cell phone carrier? I’d love a magical phone that get can reception even in an abandoned sewer tunnel with a battery than never runs dry. I’m surprised that Verizon hasn’t snapped Kiefer up as a spokesperson!)

The next step in cell phone evolution is likely to be “stationary” lines that can share cell minutes. That way people could still have a phone at home and another on the go, without having two bills to pay. Or, we could just cut to the chase and get on with the subdermal iPhone implants!

When not taking calls on our cell phones, my office orders our w-2’s online, and we backups key files to a remote Subversion repository. We’ve been experimenting with sharing Google Applications too. I seem to have a learning disability when it comes to graphics software and spreadsheets. But, the Google spreadsheet is easy enough to use, even for a knucklehead like me.

Of course, being an ASF geek, what I like best about Google Apps is the built-in collaboration features. You can share a document or spreadsheet with any other googler, or with the public generally, either read-only or read-write. That Google Apps bake-in sharing is truly joyful, since collaboration is the answer.

I work remotely with clients over the Internet, most often to pair-program. We’ve tried a number of products, including Windows Messenger and RealVNC. Our new best friend is an add-on to Skype, called Unyte. You can make the telephone-over-internet call with Skype, and then bring up application sharing with Unyte. The free version generously allows up to four people to conference into your desktop.

We seem to be experiencing a bit more latency with Unyte, especially when a remote caller tries to take control. But, Unyte is able to connect through my client’s firewall, which has been a problem with Messenger lately. (RealVNC still works, but only over the VPN, and only if the sharing happened from my client’s side.)

I know many corporations still value “seat time”, but using open source practices, I’m easy to track what’s happening from where I sit. All of my work ends up in Subversion, Confluence, or JIRA (are these ever going to be one product?), all of which post to a mailing list as I work. I make frequent commits are mainly so that I can roll back to a working version if I break something, but also to document my work for my colleagues, step by step. It’s easy for anyone following the list to see how much I’ve done when.

Minute to minute, it’s likely that I’m the best documented worker in the enterprise :)