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IPFS News Link • General Opinion

Ten Office Items that Will Be Relics by 2017

• http://www.technologyreview.com, Jessica Leber
 I ditched my Rolodex a full ten years ago in favor of an online address book, but old habits die hard in many kinds of offices, and technologies can take a long time to penetrate.

A new LinkedIn survey of 7,000 professionals around the world showed that 58 percent of workers believed the Rolodex would be an office relic by 2017, taking the third spot on the list (that leaves 32 percent who think we'll be hanging on to business cards). The top two technologies slated for extinction in the "Office Endangered Species" study were tape recorders (79 percent) and fax machines (71 percent). A third of the survey respondents believed desk phones and desktop computers would also go by the wayside.

Who even needs desks at that point? Apparently, not everyone. The responses also indicated people are thinking about new ways of interacting with coworkers—some believed standard working hours, formal business attire, cubicles, and executives' corner offices will soon seem old-fashioned. These trends are undoubtedly buoyed by the rise of mobile devices in the work place, for better or worse (see "Is Mobile Computing Good for Productivity?")


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