I think one way in which we saw this movie before, was with the move to offshoring programming. It was really big 5-10 years ago, and then quietly got unwound

I think one way in which we saw this movie before, was with the move to offshoring programming. It was really big 5-10 years ago, and then quietly got unwound when it turned out that close communication between teams requires more than phone, email, and video. There are places where it works (I am an example of that), but it normally doesn't work all that well, because the advantages of being in one physical space are normally hard to quantify and thus hard to reproduce.