Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

This blog is always interested in technological change and, especially, tipping points. In my first true PR job (1987-88) I saw one such. The firm was a pioneer, employing no secretaries and putting a computer on each executive's desk at a time when this was unusual. Press releases, however, were usually sent out by post. Fax machines, though by then present in every office, were still fairly expensive. People had barely started to notice that competition had brought down the cost of phone calls whereas postal rates were continuing to rise. Then there was a postal strike.

As a result of the strike we started issuing press releases by fax. Business more or less abandoned the post for anything time sensitive overnight.  For photographs we used couriers and for text we used the fax. Faxes soon improved, with plain paper machines and falling prices, but were, nonetheless, superseded by email with a decade or so.

As part of preparation for the Olympics and the presumed pressure on London's transport infrastructue the government has been uring people who work in London to work from home over the coming weeks.  No doubt quite a few people will try it. While people with period season tickets will save no money, people with Oyster cards, where the bulk discount is provided for a limited number of journeys not a limited period of time, will do so.

Significant numbers of people in office jobs can work part or all of the week from home. Once people have tried it – saving anything from one to three hours a day in travel – a great many people will want to stick with it. Managers will need to learn to manage people's tasks, not their presence in the building.

London continues to have a vast housing shortage. While prices would clearly be hit, a million new homes in London could easily find a market. So what if people convert a significant proportion of office and retail space for residential purposes. Plainly, over the next few decades, that is where the demand is going to be. People do not need offices and no-one needs to visit shops, but people do need somewhere to live. New living space would open up in central London. People would also be willing to live further from central London. If you need to visit your office once a week not once a day, then commuting much greater distances becomes practical. The 05:00 from Exeter is tolerable, once a week. 

Over the next 20 years or so, a shift from commercial to residential uses of land seems certain. But will the Olympics be seen as the moment it all began?