Glenn Reynolds writes at TCS about the trend away from bespoke offices and into working in more public spaces:

The "push" comes from the office environment. If you're reading this column, you have almost certainly also read Dilbert, and I'm tempted to simply cite the comic strip and say "case closed." But there's more to it than that.

Yes, the office environment can be unpleasant, and the commute can be nasty and time-consuming (and expensive), too. That's one reason people like to work at home. But working at home has its own problems, since it can be hard to maintain the work/non-work boundaries. And who wants to meet with clients in your den?

On the other hand, offices are expensive. I've noticed a lot of small business people in my area giving up their offices, and having meetings in public places -- Starbucks, Borders, the Public Library, and so on. In fact, a real estate agent recently told me that the small-office commercial real estate market is actually suffering as a result of so many people making this kind of move.

The "push" comes from people wanting to get out of offices. But the "pull" comes from the technology that makes it possible, and from the desire of businesses to cash in. Personal tech like laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc., coupled with wi-fi and other technologies that allow Internet access from all over, means that you don't need to be at the office nearly as much anymore.

If a home is, in Le Corbusier's words, a "machine for living," then an office is a "machine for working." But nowadays, the machinery is looking a bit obsolescent. The traditional office took shape in the 19th Century, and the shape it took was in no small part the result of technology: the need for people to be close to each other, and to services like telegraphs, telephones, messengers and (later) faxes, copy machines, and computers.

You can pretty much carry all that stuff with you now. And people are doing it.

That means that there's a market for places that cater to them. Right now we're seeing the early phase of that, with amenities that focus on wi-fi and lattes. In time, we're likely to see a lot more than that. …

Indeed. I had a latte in the Pimlico Café Nero earlier this afternoon, and got some blogging work done, in the form of hand scribbled notes aimed at a longish blog posting that I will do Real Soon Now. But although I am not laptopped up and nor were most of the other Café Nerotics, I did see one young woman using a laptop with great enthusiasm. She had headphones on as well and was chatting happily into them. Business or pleasure? Both, would be my guess.

TV took everyone indoors during the hours of darkness and left the streets clear for the criminals (of the sort who didn't own couches and TVs), and the TV shows themselves then set about cranking out the next three or four generations of criminals, by showing them how very exciting it was to be a criminal. Now the Internet is (a) putting on a more intelligent, less criminal-creating kind of a show, and (b) taking us all back into the streets, re-establishing a modern rerun of couples promenading through the streets and raising their top hats to one another.

And if you add (c ) the portable phone, which means that you can already now run great gobs of your business from anywhere, without even sitting down, let alone being indoors in a fixed place of work, it adds up to something not unlike a revolution, or at any rate a counter-revolution.