Originally Posted by ahmetdouas

What i was thinking is that people will travel less when this is all over once they get used to web conferencing. As a salesperson, I personally prefer face to face meetings, but there are many catch up meetings that can be done over web conference quite easily.

Originally Posted by riku2

No, I would say this has changed massively in recent years. Many companies have moved their data centres to the cloud and have no hardware of their own and even those with data centres are virtualizing everything and the data centre is just running a load of VM's or Kubernetes pods. I would say that in the past 10 years the amount of on-site work needed when you deliver software to a company has dropped by about 90%, most of it can be done remotely. Years ago I would travel to places like the Philippines to upgrade the software from one release to another at 3am in the morning, now our software can be upgraded with a single unix command and there's no downtime since Kubernetes upgrades one container at a time with no service interruption.

Originally Posted by bobbytables

Oh, absolutely. But you're talking about software. I'm talking about hardware. There is a still a *lot* of business travel related to the installation and maintenance of industrial machines, computer hardware, telecommunications equipment, transportation infrastructure, and so on. A lot of stuff that, by its very nature, simply cannot be done remotely. If the expertise doesn't exist locally to carry out the task, someone will need to come from somewhere else.