Your personal experience may have been different, but it does not change the fact that almost no major commercial product has come out a fully-distributed compa

Your personal experience may have been different, but it does not change the fact that almost no major commercial product has come out a fully-distributed company. Individual anecdotes that support one case or another are easy to dig up, but you would be hard-pressed to find large pieces of really innovative software products developed without people in close proximity (you could claim that the Linux Kernel is a big project but that's an open source software that is not really a commercial product). Everybody can not move to the Bay Area, and good developers do not become bad by moving away or not being there, but the simple fact remains: there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.