New nomads

Operations: The point of this move is to make IT closer to customers.
Colleague: Then it makes sense for me to move to an office in the south of Moscow instead of the north — my main clients are there ...
Operations: Yes, maybe ...
I: And then where should I move?
Chef: And you ... you don't care at all, even to Novosibirsk.


I remembered this conversation sitting once again on the plane, when I calculated that in the last six months this was my 40th flight. I am an IT manager "by region" in a large manufacturing company. The company has almost a hundred branches throughout Russia and the CIS, and at the same time different “filling” of the regions - somewhere factories and trade, somewhere only trade, and somewhere only raw materials. Accordingly, the tasks faced by IT are somewhat different.

What does this mean for me personally? Many things. I work partly in the Moscow office, and partly on business trips, in the vast expanses of ours. I periodically live in airplanes and airports (the Lord gave us wifi, when will it finally appear free of charge at Russian airports?), I can reply to the mail at 4.00 Moscow time and consider the ideology of remote access to the company's network “the only true teaching”.
')
And now look at your friends / acquaintances / buddies - for sure you will find someone with a similar lifestyle. Most likely you are increasingly communicating with him remotely - social networks, IM or email - it does not matter. We are those who are called “digital nomads”, “network nomads” or, more accurately, “new nomads”.

Here is what WordSpy says:
digital nomad (n.) .

The film “I would be in heaven” (“Up in the Air”) with Clooney is about our lifestyle.

Such a way of life dictates a certain organization of work: continued the call to Vladivostok until 11 am Moscow time? Sorry, dear friend, see you tomorrow - it is already 6 pm, people have gone home. Wrote an email that requires an urgent response in ... hmm ... one of the neighboring countries? Call in addition - otherwise almost 100% will respond to the letter outside of any reasonable time frame - mentality ... nice people, very hospitable, but very relaxed in work ...

It also dictates the requirements for services and stored information: all data is stored in the company's network (the laptop does not last forever, correspondence is very important), a constant backup of contacts, the ability to watch current projects online, corporate IM - more convenient to mail, meetings via LiveMeeting Omsk, at least from Tashkent, and Avaya softphone generally needs to be included in the image of the corporate OS and set up a way out from the outside - to call an internal number is cheaper than calling a mobile ...

And the information needs (and with it the appropriate gadgets) are also partly due to the way of life: read something (a book or twenty emails) while sitting at the airport; watch with a half-closed eye movie in an airplane or find how to get to a hotel in a destination city; chat on Facebook, while waiting for a delayed flight and stuff like that. Yes, and so that all this splendor works at least 7-8, and better than 10 hours away from the outlet - an hour in the taxi to the airport and the registration two hours before the flight has not been canceled.

A laptop? Aha With enhanced battery and corporate XP on board. And you tried, standing in a crowd of taxi drivers and waving away from the eternal "where we are going, taxis must-eat checks-inexpensive-well they don’t meet" to get a laptop and, holding it with one hand (in the second portlet, for example), wait until it wakes up go to Outlook and find a letter with the driver’s contacts? Nothing complicated - just not comfortable.
As well as carrying with you a bunch of gadgets - a player, a reading room, a couple of phones, different charging ... When you fly only with hand luggage - you get used to appreciate every kilogram and place in the bag.

And now let's get a little distracted and look at the story. There were nomads and were sedentary tribes. How did knowledge spread among nomads? Orally. A nomadic lifestyle does not involve a large baggage of books. And appropriate skills. Settling appeared - writing appeared, skills changed - the ability to read and save the accumulated knowledge in writing became necessary for development. The explosive development of fundamental science among nomads is impossible in principle.

Why am I telling all this? But to what: look around you - the world in a circle has come to such a stage of development when nomads are again in demand and therefore they appear.
As well as infrastructure for us.

Appear new devices - Amazon Kindle and netbooks - were the first swallows in this series. And the MID ideology itself - who else, except geeks and nomads, may need most of the functions of such devices?

By the way, the same iPad is almost perfect for my needs. Not without flaws, but its flaws are only marketing and extra money pumping policy — like in a MacBook you need to buy a cable for $ 30 to connect via HDMI to a TV. Wait a bit - and there will be cables for connecting to the projector and other accessories. Dock - USB cable, by the way, is already included. And the next model will probably be with HD screen and WiMax.

There are also services for “new nomads” - Google Voice, Google Docs / Thinkfree / Zoho ... Evernote / Mobile Me, etc. Social networks - the same. This does not mean that this service is unavailable or inconvenient to others - but one of the main ideas of these services is independence from the place of use.

And the corporate market is not lagging behind - MS Office is working increasingly closely with the corporate portal (at Sharepoint, of course), and the internal portal has long been called "corporate classmates." LotusLive is actually a “corporate facebook” ...

Want to understand if Jobs screwed up with a tablet who needs a new tablet? Or where the world is heading what service will be in demand? Imagine yourself a "new nomad" - what do you need?