Jack Nilles didn’t invent remote work because it sounded trendy. He coined “telecommuting” in 1973 because he was fed up. A trained physicist working with NASA and the Air Force, Nilles stared down traffic jams in D.C. and asked a blunt question: if we can send people to the moon, why are we still dragging office workers into downtown for paperwork? The idea wasn’t a philosophy. It was a fix an engineer’s fix for an inefficiency that had gone unnoticed because everyone just accepted it. He ran experiments, got government funding, showed results. The data was solid. But managers didn’t want it.
They weren’t ready.
From Tech Curiosities to Working Systems
Before the corporate world caught on, the tools were already creeping in. Fax machines in the ‘60s, voicemail in the ‘70s, company intranets in the ‘80s. IBM, for its part, quietly let five workers go remote in 1979. Four years later, that number was 2,000. But nobody made a fuss about it. It was treated like a side note, not a sea change.
What actually moved the needle was less about belief and more about bandwidth. Once the tech caught up modems, terminals, floppy disks, and eventually the internet telework wasn’t just possible. It was productive. Then came Lotus Notes. Then came ISDN video links. By the mid-1990s, companies could run meetings from opposite coasts, share applications live, and brainstorm across time zones. PictureTel, WebEx, NetMeeting they weren’t slick. But they worked.
Still, adoption stayed slow. Culturally, work was still about presence. Managers wanted eyes on people. They equated proximity with performance. So even when tools like VPNs, cloud drives, and mobile phones exploded in the early 2000s, most firms used them to extend office hours, not replace them.
Then the World Broke
The pandemic didn’t introduce remote work. It forced a global stress test. Suddenly, half of America’s small businesses sent their teams home. Overnight, video calls became default. Zoom shot past 40 million users. Slack became lifeblood. Microsoft Teams, once clunky, became mandatory. People worked from closets, laundry rooms, garages. There was no strategy. Just survival.
And yet, productivity didn’t collapse. In many cases, it rose. Turns out, when workers aren’t stuck in traffic or trapped in cubicles, they can actually get more done. Not everyone thrived, of course. Parents struggled. Some teams cracked. “Zoom fatigue” became shorthand for the psychological hangover of digital overexposure. But the old arguments against remote work about trust, collaboration, culture suddenly felt flimsy.
The genie was out. It wasn’t going back in.
The Tools That Took Over
Collaboration software didn’t just ride the wave. It was the wave. In 2019, about 55% of companies used these tools. By 2021, it jumped to 79%. That’s not evolution. That’s whiplash.
The market followed. What was a $39 billion industry in 2023 is projected to triple to over $116 billion by 2033. The U.S. alone doubled its remote collaboration spend from $8 billion in 2022 to a projected $16 billion. And the growth isn’t just vertical. It’s lateral. Platforms like Miro, born in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, are now in 250,000 organizations globally. They aren’t just whiteboards they’re ecosystems.
Zoom, meanwhile, became a verb. Founder Eric Yuan left Cisco frustrated with Webex’s limits, launched a leaner product in 2013, and scaled it like a madman. By 2015, they weren’t just another video app. They were the connective tissue for remote teams. Engineers built integrations. HR teams onboarded new hires through it. Boardrooms ran off it. For many, it was the only “office” they knew.
Culture, Changed Forever
By 2023, 28% of global workers were remote. In the U.S., over 22% worked remotely at least part-time. Gallup’s numbers from 2024 say this: 20% of workers are fully remote, 52% hybrid, and 60% would switch jobs if forced back to the office. That’s not a preference. That’s a red line.
This isn’t just about freedom or flexibility. It’s about leverage. Employees finally have it and they know it.
The Unfinished Shift
Here’s the truth nobody says out loud: remote collaboration isn’t solved. It’s fragmented, overwhelming, sometimes lonely. There are still trust gaps, still bad managers, still burnout. But the direction of travel is clear. The infrastructure’s in place. The next chapter is less about invention, more about integration making tools talk to each other, making hybrid actually work.
Platforms like Miro now market themselves as “Innovation Workspaces,” trying to close those cracks. It’s ambitious. Necessary. Maybe overdue. But it signals something deeper: we’ve moved from enabling remote work to rethinking what work is.
Nilles called it fifty years ago. The tools are just catching up.
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Tobias is a Berlin-based startup scout and event reporter who explores global tools, tech events, and founder-friendly platforms.
