When you needed office services you went to one of these sites and took over a cubicle for the day. Everything was networked so you could do whatever you would have done from your home base (which was eliminated).
I don't know if this caught on, or whether it still exists, but I don't think the main idea was ecological, it was to make workers feel even more interchangeable and dispensable. It also prevented building up any community of labor, especially when IBM was trashing its existing benefits packages.
I think they partially lost an anti-discrimination suit over some of these practices. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Offices are where people gossip, plot politics, run covert popularity contests, intrude on each other's sonic space with phone calls, typing, radios, and other distractions, and waste time in unproductive meetings.
They're fine if you score in the top couple of standard deviations on extraversion, but for anyone who needs a quieter environment they're unpleasant white collar battery farms.
I'm not doing a lot that I wouldn't be doing in an office - but I am dealing with a small number of people one to one instead of trying to get decisions by committee, and I also have the time and space to get on with projects without distractions.
I have occasionally worked on-site for half a day or a day, and I always find that whatever I'm trying to do takes at least twice as long.
I think offices work for campus-style collaborations, or for studios of various kinds. But considering the commuting, energy and building costs required to run an office, I'm not so convinced that they're excellent value for money for most people.
Do people who collaborate remotely as on this site feel alone? I probably have more in common with bloggers I've never met than with many of my neighbors. (It's hard to tell, most of them never stick their heads out of their houses.) Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
A few years ago IBM set up empty office suits.
Weren't empty suits always a key part of IBM culture?
