The CEO of Cisco says "Part of the reason I’m optimistic about our economy long run is I believe we’re at the front end of a productivity shift much like we saw from 1997 through 2004" driven by collaboration and social networking.  He is predicting a "7 to 10 year increase in worker productivity."

Cisco has the same motivation as Assembla - to sell tools for communication and coordination of distributed teams.  However, Cisco is thousands of times bigger, and they have the luxury of talking about big economic effects, worth trillions of dollars.

We've seen a lot of changes and productivity improvements from globalization - the 1997-2004 effect.  That era gave us a lot of new people to work with.  Are we going to see another burst of wealth creation from actually working together more effectively and more creatively?  Will we start moving work around in global teams, rather than isolating it in functional offices?