In the modern world you may often see busy people sitting in a cafe or airport lounge checking email or updating their Facebook or Twitter status. Just how far the world has come is of no surprise to those of us who are old hands in the work from anywhere stakes. In the days of MySQL AB (now a part of Sun Microsystems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation) around 70% of the workforce worked from home. In fact, the title of this piece, Freedom to work anywhere, is a direct steal from a MySQL jobs campaign, and I have several MySQL T-shirts with the slogan on it.

Is it important? You betcha it is. With a solid technology base you can easily have a highly motivated (and highly mobile) workforce that will give you far more in output than you have a right to expect, and at a cost that is dramatically lower than the traditional work environment.

Think about it. What is the cost of office space, a desk, chair, air conditioning, lighting, staff amenities, etc, compared to the cost of an internet connection?

With technologies like OpenVPN, IRC, Skype, Asterisk, and of course all of the Mozilla suite of web tools, you can have a distributed and productive work force that can react quickly to demanding schedules and rapid changes in priorities. Your main web server decides to act up during the night? No problem, chances are your head web dev is online anyway or is in a timezone conducive to tackling the problem.

This technology lowers the barrier of entry for startups, allowing them to compete in a global market from day one without having to build the bricks-and-mortar structures of the past before you can attract staff. I notice that an old colleague of mine has taken this to heart, with whatever he is up to at Empire Avenue. Might be worth keeping an eye on these guys.

You really have to wonder about those companies that don't embrace the Work From Anywhere meme, and are stuck in the mindset that predates the modern communication era. (I was going to say it is 20th century thinking, but my first stint of telecommuting was in the 1980's).

I have done my daily work from a variety of places, and solved problems remotely from Lake Tahoe, heaps of coffee shops, and even more recently at 100km/hr down the Western Hwy (no, I wasn't driving). My employer is happy, and so am I.