Freedom and Space
Freedom and Space
HP CEO Meg Whitman just announced that HP employees will no longer be able to telecommute because the company will need “all hands on deck” at the corporate offices. Few details emerged on who these telecommuters were or what they were doing from their homes. The announcement was strangely similar to another by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer a couple months ago. In both cases, the argument was that colocation would lead to increased productivity through teamwork and enhanced collaboration.
Dear Linux Pro Reader,
HP CEO Meg Whitman just announced that HP employees will no longer be able to telecommute because the company will need "all hands on deck" at the corporate offices. Few details emerged on who these telecommuters were or what they were doing from their homes. The announcement was strangely similar to another by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer a couple months ago. In both cases, the argument was that co-location would lead to increased productivity through teamwork and enhanced collaboration.
Both announcements met with criticism from the tech community. Telecommuting has long been considered the wave of the future. Yet it isn't like Whitman and Mayer are living in the stone age. What I found so interesting about the announcements of HP and Yahoo, as well as Microsoft's continuing preference for its huge corporate campus in Redmond and Apple's mission to build a gigantic spaceship-like headquarters for all its South-Bay employees, is how boldly this version of reality contradicts the story we are getting from the dozens of vendors hawking "remote collaboration" products. I don't know how many press releases I read every month from companies with amazing tools designed to help users collaborate from far away, yet many of the leading tech companies are saying they don't want their employees far away.
[...]
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