I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking. I suspect that during the first dot-com boom, open offices were all the rage because they were

I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking. I suspect that during the first dot-com boom, open offices were all the rage because they were cheaper. When I entered the industry in 1998, my employer (a start-up) had an open office, as it was less expensive to find used desks and skip cubes altogether. In fact, I didn't work in my first cube farm 'til I took my current job seven years ago--instead, my employers generally had four person cubes/pods. Heck, in the late 1970s, my dad's engineering firm had "pods" for certain functional groups.