> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their w

> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. That's great that this is the case for you in the situation you were in; but the assertion that "people who work in an office together share instant communication, and people who work remotely have slow communication" is obviously false. I've worked plenty of real world offices where communication was done only via email and took ages. On the other hand, the job I work at now, I work remotely 4 days a week and communication is instantaneous. We have a company IRC server and if you're working it's expected you'll be on there. There's always phones but IRC + email work 99% of the time. Remote work is the future; the reasons to work in an office together are evaporating. As remote video conferencing improves (and as someone who uses it every week, let me tell you, it still sucks) the benefits of being together in person disappear. This is an idiotic move by Yahoo!, and shows that they have no clue what the are doing.