The "individual offices" aspect is interesting. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Microsoft went from success to success and the corporate culture got re

The "individual offices" aspect is interesting. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Microsoft went from success to success and the corporate culture got really established, software engineering research showed that developers were more effective with individual offices and big monitors. By 2005/2006, when I was looking at corporate culture at MS, things had changed: with the advent of pair programming and agile methods, many designers and developers are more effective in shared spaces -- and many prefer those environments. NOT cubicle farms, which are the worst of all world, and NOT large badly-designed open-spaces ... but there are plenty of other good options. However, "individual offices" for devs is now such a status symbol for the teams that still have them, that people at the management level are very unwilling to change. One designer I know spent literally a year trying to get permission to get his 12-person team into an open space. In the end he gave up and eventually left the company.