The Tube Strike can be costly to central London companies, and one way to minimise the disruption is by mobilising employees, which is now getting a lot easier thanks to mobile broadband and smartphones. Indeed Summer 2009 is seeing a number of major smartphone releases, including the Nokia N97, the Apple iPhone v3 and Palm Pre, all of which are effectively mobile computers and would allow an employee to stay in touch with head office, checking e-mail on the go, so that wherever they were work could continue and the disruption to the company would be minimised. The advent of these technologies will no doubt make working from home more popular, and the geographic distribution of employees can have benefits in terms of continuity of business in the event of a major issue such as the Tube Strike. Another technology trend that will help in these situations is Cloud Computing, where a company's computing resources are provided as a service over the internet. Clearly this too would massively help employees working from home as effectively their home computer access would be identical to that in the office.
Clearly the London Tube Strike is going to be a major inconvenience to commuters, and those who want to avoid the chaos could consider booking a last minute hotel room in London with LateRooms instead so that they can avoid travelling altogether.
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