This really seems to miss the mark, at least for me. I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I hate the office has nothing to do with technology. It's that the office carries prerequisites that rob me of the most valuable non-renewable resource in my life, time.

The office means commuting, and commuting means waking up earlier and sitting a metal box for half an hour twice per weekday. That's 250+ needlessly wasted hours a year. Over a 40 year career, that works out to somewhere around 10,000 hours of wasted time I never get back. That's literally throwing away more than an entire year of my life for no reason other than appeasing the outdated, inefficient 20th century preferences of some executive - one who I am already literally giving close to half of my waking life to, in exchange for not starving to death and being homeless.

$&%# that! I've been 100% WFH since March 2020 and I'm never working another non-100%-remote job ever again.

Bad commute has a far stronger influence on my feelings than bad tech or any other attribute of the office itself. Open office plans are a bad idea, we all know that, and hotdesking is absurd - but you could offer me a private suite a la Microsoft in the '90s, in a building equipped with Google amenities, and it would not tempt me at all if I had to drive across town to get there.

In my present job, on the other hand, I work for a remote-first startup with employees around half the globe, where all meetings are video calls and nobody would care (or even notice) if I chose never to visit the office, but I come in almost every day just the same. It's not because the office itself is anything special - it's just a room full of desks in a coworking space - but getting here is an easy walk from home, and the change of scenery is pleasant.

"And yet, dissatisfaction with virtual meetings is real. There is now a growing understanding that tech alone will not be enough to effectively bring people together to work. What’s needed just as much are physical spaces for employees to meet in."

There's an even more obvious solution--not having so many meetings. I mean, are you there to work, or to gab about work? Also, the reason you need 'meeting spaces' is because you've taken away everyone's office, in favor of a sweatshop model of space usage. No amount of "envisioning new office technology solutions" is going to make up for the fact that most offices are just lousy places to work.

This article seems so disconnected from my own lived experience that I can't even say it's wrong -- it just seems to describe an alien world that bears no relationship to the one I live in. As an example:

> “Innovations” like booking systems for hotdesking become obsolete when the office is already optimised in terms of its overall flow of people. Employees don’t need to stress or fight over limited workspaces; there’s always a free desk available for everyone.

This seems to accept that hotdesking itself is an acceptable thing. The problem with hotdesking isn't the booking systems or whether or not the office is "optimized in terms of overall flow of people". The problem is that hotdesking is inherently an anti-human thing. There is no way of doing it "correctly".