Remote work has many upsides as well as downsides when compared to working in office. What's interesting to me is, that many of the upsides of home office (whi

Remote work has many upsides as well as downsides when compared to working in office. What's interesting to me is, that many of the upsides of home office (which are also the downsides of going onsite) seem to be pretty much inherent and unavoidable. Companies doing home office can hire from a larger pool, have less expenses for offices and onsite services, no commuting allowances, etc. Employees working in home office have no commute, less car costs, more food options, are freed of open-plan office distractions, etc. At the same time, most of the downsides of home office (and thus the upsides of onsite work) do mostly concern communication and organization and should be solvable. Online Meetings suck, because all video/voice chats are crap. You can't get in touch as quickly as tapping someone on the shoulder - because messengers are crap. And so on, and so forth. So basically, all our tools for online-collaboration are not able to adequately replace in-person communication. Something is obviously getting lost. It's kinda interesting, that Google does not seem interested in figuring out what the problem is, and improving upon their tools. It would seem to me that making Google's online collaboration tools better to overcome those problems and provide a remote work experience that doesn't suffer from all those drawbacks, would be a great business opportunity. Instead they are basically throwing in the towel and admitting that they are unable to make it work well, right?