1. If it isn’t going to become the market leader, I have to admit I am more curious about what will. Starbucks++? In a sense I am not an early adopter of innovations. I am more of a “fast follower” … jump on whatever looks like it will be the ‘category killer.’ I suppose it has to do with a fundamental belief somewhere in the back of my head that ‘it isn’t real unless it goes mainstream.’

2. The intentions of early adopters may not matter. Sometimes things go mainstream DESPITE the efforts of the early adopters to keep things to themselves. Crossing the chasm is a matter of an innovations basic DNA, not the explicit goals of the people involved. People whose identity fundamentally revolves around being avant-garde will leave the moment something goes mainstream and look for the next stage, usually with murmurs of “the old authenticity is gone, it sold out, it is all crass mainstream people now.” Twitter seems on the verge of that

I’d say Venkat’s take on coworking’s view of itself is pretty accurate. Adoption/growth isn’t a stated value in that system; in fact, the stated value is “sustainability”. However, I’ll also say that this is not what attracts me to coworking (well, that’s not true… I do buy in to the values). What’s also interesting to me is the challenge that coworking represents to the status quo of “the office”, because it’s successful and growing, because it’s allowing a very valuable group of innovators to enjoy the benefits of a work community without dealing with the traditional office BS (caricatured or not), and because it’s attracting a lot of attention. When people in corporate HR have heard of coworking (albeit a small number of them to date) that’s impressive — it’s only been a recognizable term for a few years.

Coworking, as narrowly defined as it is today, may not become the market leader — that’s not even a goal — but I do believe it will catalyze a change in how we think about work.

Venkat, I enjoyed the review and your analysis.

Todd Sundsted

I am not attempting definitions. I am reporting my perceptions of what I am hearing and reading. It would be great if the movement outgrows the perceptions it seems to be projecting right now.

Venkat

It seems to me that the cultural dimension can take on any number of dimensions, and becomes the glue, and the added value to a given work site. Sure there will always be coffee shops, and there may come to be low cost sites associated with housing, but there will also be high value sites whose culture will give back more value to a perhaps narrowly defined part of this market and that type of CoWorking site will likely thrive as well.

When you try to so narrowly define it, well then you have a lot to criticize, no doubt, and makes for discussion in a review (I’ve not read the book), but I can’t help feeling the points are moot.

As for healthcare, that’s a whole other issue. I think employer-sponsored healthcare was a bad model to begin with, so coworking inheriting that function would be worse. That said, on the ‘guild’ end, bodies like IEEE do offer healthcare access, but not very good. This is one area where I think national+portable (but not free) is likely the right direction.

Justin: I think guild models are merely the extreme form of horizontal economic organization, and are not necessarily more agile. They just have flexible scaling in a different dimension. Clockspeed, by Charles Fine, which I reviewed, talked about a basic horizontal/vertical cycling dynamic in industries. I don’t think competition is any more of an issue than in the cross-functional aggregation of talent in companies… there different “vertical” projects comprising multi-functional teams compete with each other. In guilds, competition is among like people/groups. There will always be competition, I think organizations primarily exist to strike a balance between demand/supply aggregation and market visibility on the one hand, and competition on the other. Seems like a good topic for a followup post.

The permanence thing is a serious issue on a physical level. In cloud computing, say on Amazon servers, you can shut down an EC2 server and bundle up your data to store on S3, and then restart a different server with the same data/code bundle later. Need something like that for workers. Maybe a mobile phone app that lists “available spaces for the day in zip code 12345″ for groups to go to in a coordinated way, with everything forced to be paperless, and PO boxes for mail at the post office. The equivalent of the s3 bundle would be a coffee machine in someone’s trunk.

Jesse: I think the ‘psychological moment’ in the game is when you pull the trigger and give up assigned office space At that point, you are no longer in ‘field test’ mode, and it feels very different. It sinks in with finality that you aren’t going to be part of the office ‘scene’ of seminars, cookies and water cooler gossip the way others are, and you have to think about career and professional issues very differently.

And I think that’s an important point, here – permanent presence vs. agility. Orange published a futures document a while back which talked – as one of its scenarios – about employment reverting to something guild-like, where professional organisations can vouch for the qualifications and reputation of their members, while providing vocation-specific support. Not sure about the cooperation/competition mix there, though, as you’d presumably be competing against your colleagues for work?

Still, interesting stuff.

Your notion of neo-British clubs probably wouldn’t legally fly in the USA.

Also, collectivized health care in the USA is not legal unless you’re purchasing on the basis of a business entity that is pursuing other ends. That is, you can’t form a group with the intention of obtaining group health care. You have to form a company of some sort, then obtain the health care for the company. Last I check, you needed 5 people involved as well.