I just read a story on NPR's website about a co-working space in New York. There are a couple of co-working spaces in our area; Hope Foundry (the excellent program that developed this website) happens at NextSpace in Santa Cruz, and The Satellite is just down the road in Felton.

From time to time, Junglemonkey says she needs an office that isn't in our house; a place where she can write without the distractions of home chores (or her adoring family). We've looked at these co-working spaces and, for telecommuting once a week or the occasional writing frenzy they just don't make economic sense. Where they would make sense is if one were a full-time one-person business; perhaps a contractor who spent a small amount of time on-site but did most of the work elsewhere.

In 2000 I was working on a startup and for the first few months I worked out of my apartment, cafés, the park, and wherever else I happened to be. I had a laptop and a Ricochet modem, so I could be anywhere, really. Eventually, we got some cube space and were working together in an office. Same story with LinkedIn, in 2002-2003, although by then Ricochet didn't exist and there were 802.11 hotspots all over.

In the story there's a quote:

"The same way that [during] the last century work shifted from blue
collar to white collar," Bacigalupo says, "I think we'll be seeing in
this century, we're going to be moving away from the idea of a
centralized Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 workplace, and we'll be moving
much more in this direction. People will work when they want where they
want."

I think that's bogus. I forget the name of that particular fallacy, but what the speaker is doing is assuming that everyone does the same kind of work and that everyone is more or less like himself. While it's true that I can focus hard and kick out a lot of code when I'm by myself, it turns out that my kind of work is really best done by a team. It's difficult to coordinate a team when they're all over the place and only connected via technology. Instant messages, cell phones, webcams, WebEx, Google wave - these are all great, but what they're doing is trying to substitute electricity for all the communication that happens when one person comes walking 50 feet down a hallway and pops into another person's cube to have a 15 minute architecture discussion with a shared whiteboard. Never mind that what often happens to me is that we arrive at some conclusions and then one or the other of us (or sometimes both) walks around the building to a third person's desk and gets some other action rolling. Things move faster when you're all close together.

For it to be true that work is going to shift away from white collar in an office and toward polo shirt in a co-working space it will need to be true that the projects will shift away from big integrated services with an ongoing maintenance and development lifecycle and toward one-off ship-and-forget projects.

There's certainly a need for such projects and such spaces, don't get me wrong. But there's no way that businesses with large repeat customer bases are going to disappear, either. So that's my prediction. Co-working spaces and the independent contractors who use them aren't going to disappear, but they'll never be the dominant paradigm for software development.