But KI's larger competitors, such as publicly traded Steelcase and Herman Miller, were hit worse by the tech falloff.

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Steelcase's Turnstone unit, which has been doing stand-up meetings for about a decade, for years played Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire, " to begin meetings.

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"Gathering big data about human behaviors can be a sensitive topic, " says Dave Lathrop, director of workspace futures and strategy at Steelcase Inc.

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Office furniture maker Steelcase asked RWD to design a system that could help even computer-illiterate salesmen configure and price a suite of office furniture using a laptop.

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And now, just as we buy our chairs at Knoll or Steelcase instead of building them, we can buy capacity in the cloud instead of building our own data centers.

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New customs tend to emerge wherever employees gather, and the openness of the GRid70 offices has led workers there to create an office-wide code of etiquette, says Steelcase's Mr. Malnor.

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These ideas are being researched and showcased 60 miles north of Manhattan, at a project called Bluespace, which has been developed by IBM and furniture company Steelcase and launched in 2001.

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Furniture maker Steelcase Inc.

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Last year Humanscale's revenue from the Freedom chair jumped another 30%. (Its gross margin hovers at 50% or so, compared with 30% for Steelcase.) This despite a memo circulated to hundreds of furniture wholesalers by Knoll and another chairmaker explaining that they regarded selling the products from Humanscale, a serious competitor, the equivalent of treason.

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