I agree with Marissa Mayer, we should never set out to have teams working apart from each other and, if I had the experience that she has had via Google I would have sent the same "memo" to all Yahoo! staff as well. When Marissa Mayer sent out the email (well, more accurately when it was leakd and I saw it reported) my initial reaction was, "Duh, of course she'd say that, it's what they do at Google!" ... no, really, the worlds largest, most successful "cloud" company operates very strictly on a "work next to your colleagues" principle as outlined by Eric Schmidt way back when: Pack them in. Almost every project: at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. The result is that virtually everyone at Google shares an office. This way, when a programmer needs to confer with a colleague, there is immediate access: no telephone tag
Project Management, Change Management, and Cloud Strategy