When location no longer matters

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The other day I got an email from someone at Wieden+Kennedy trying to lure me to Portland. It’s not the first time someone has tried to proactively recruit me or tried to lure me away with some vague promise of something. This was a little different though:

Have you ever wanted to have a radio in your office, dedicated to entertaining you? Nap rooms when you’re too tired to think or had Spike Lee show up to an agency meeting?

W+K is one of the agencies that understands the Internet. They also have a two letter domain name. I don’t think that’s coincidence. As awesome as it would be to work for W+K, I was forced to respectfully decline. After a quick back and forth, I asked if it might be possible to work at their New York office, but this was the response I got:

What can I do to entice you to consider us in PDX?

How do I answer that? How about this:

What do I have to do to convince you that I can do my job just as well, if not better, without moving to Portland?

Really, why should I have to move to Portland? Why is it still normal for people to relocate for work? For certain professions I understand it—you need to be in the office every day. That’s how work “gets done.” But that doesn’t apply to me. And I’m not just saying that because I believe that I deserve to be an exception. There are, undoubtably, thousands of others just like me—there is nothing I do “at work” that I can’t do from anywhere with an electric socket and a decent Internet connection.

Why isn’t telecommuting the norm? Why do we still coordinate everything over those shitty Polycom conference phones? Why isn’t video conferencing the norm? Why don’t more companies use IRC or something like Campfire? Let’s ditch the conference call and use Mumble instead. Let’s axe the white board and use Draft.

It’s 2010. Relocate for work? What are we doing?

HBO GO – Who thought of this?

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So, I’ve seen these HBO GO posters all over the city. One of the things I miss about not having a TV and cable is the ability to watch HBO’s original productions, so HBO GO seemed like an awesome solution. But even just looking at the posters I thought, “It sounds as if you might need a cable subscription in order to use it, but that would be the dumbest thing ever so that can’t be the case.” I went ahead and got home to go see what the deal was. Yeah, dumbest idea ever.

You have to have a cable subscription, with HBO, in order to use the service. Who thought this was a good idea? Why would you spend all that money for hosting and bandwidth to bring HBO ONLY to people who are already paying for it? My guess is that it has to do with their contracts. Verizon and Comcast would pitch a fit, and probably threaten to drop HBO all together if they started offering their service à la carte to anyone in the world willing to pay for it. You know what though? Maybe they should. HBO should piss off the major telcos. I’m sure someone will pick them up. See how many people drop Comcast and Verizon for DirecTV when DirecTV is the only one who offers HBO.

The reason I don’t have cable is because it’s too expensive and most of the things on TV are terrible. I’d gladly pay $10/mo for access to HBO GO, assuming it has a large enough library. I’m sure a lot of people would be willing to pay for such a service as well. But I’m not going to pay upwards of $50/mo for cable TV and HBO.