Jackson West writes about the growing importance of cafes in the Bay Area as workspaces:
Forget Palo Alto garages-- San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your startup off the ground. Internet cafes are emerging as an important place to get work done, hold meetings and network. Since writers, designers, developers and anyone else who can work from their laptop are going to show up, you can even recruit talent, publicize your project and even demo your product for potential users and investors.
The idea of the cafe as the new startup space, or more generally as a business places (and not just to sell coffee, but to conduct a wide variety of businesses) has a lovely early modern quality about it, as anybody who's read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle has learned.
I don't know how generalizable West's argument is: while I can work happily in a cafe for hours, I know plenty of people whose companies have too much weird hardware or are running too deep in stealth mode to conduct their critical business in a cafe. But even if it's of limited scope, the anecdote reinforces a point that many smart writers about the relationship between the Internet and physical places have made.
At one time, it was thought, the Internet was going to kill geography. Place just wouldn't matter any more: people could work anywhere, corporate offices would hollow out, and everyone would just connect up via fax or Web. Of course, that hasn't happened. Instead, what we've seen instead is that Web access (and especially wireless access) doesn't make place irrelevant, it just changes the criteria people use for deciding which places they're going to work in.
The shift from garages to cafes reflects not a sense that you can completely do away with offices or meeting-spaces, but a shift in preference away from spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions.
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