I work for one of those companies, and yes, I do think they should bear part of the blame. Look at the large tech companies of the past - IBM, DEC, Sun. They h

I work for one of those companies, and yes, I do think they should bear part of the blame. Look at the large tech companies of the past - IBM, DEC, Sun. They had many buildings in many cities all across the country. HQ would be bigger, sometimes there'd be notable clusters of buildings in one area (e.g. Littleton or Marlboro for DEC). Often a certain building/region would have a particular technology or product focus. The thing is, it worked and it even worked even before we had modern communications technology. The reasons those companies declined had nothing to do with the efficiency of their physical work environment. Google and Facebook and Amazon could do the same thing. Yes, they all have offices elsewhere, often in the same few places (e.g. Boston). But they're still massively overconcentrated in Mountain View, Menlo Park, and one particular part of Seattle. They all literally have money to burn, so they don't care, but it has all kinds of negative effects both on their own workers and on the general economy throughout the area. It's just inefficient. It's a waste of everybody's money and energy. And that's before we even get into the issue of letting people work remotely. ;)