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Microsoft to Expand Campus, as Amazon Looks Elsewhere
While Amazon is hunting for a second headquarters away from its hometown, its neighbor in the Seattle area — Microsoft — is doubling down on the region, with plans to invest billions of dollars in redeveloping its existing campus.
The project, which Microsoft plans to announce at its annual meeting of shareholders on Wednesday, amounts to a major overhaul of the company's 500-acre campus in Redmond, Wash., the leafy Seattle suburb that it has called home since 1986.
The company will take a wrecking ball to 12 old buildings, replacing them with 18 taller ones with more open work environments. The construction will add about 2.5 million square feet of new space to the roughly 15 million it has in the area, enough room for an additional 8,000 employees.
Microsoft's redevelopment, which will take five to seven years to complete, would not ordinarily stand out — lots of technology companies outgrow their offices and need new space. But this is Microsoft, a company that spent years fumbling new initiatives, laying off employees and retrenching from key markets. The bet on a bigger, more modern campus is a symbol of its resurgence over the past few years under its chief executive, Satya Nadella, who has made invigorating Microsoft's culture one of his top priorities.
It is also hard not to notice the contrast to Amazon, the area's younger and buzzier technology company. After Amazon announced its plans for a second headquarters, cities and regions laid out tax breaks and other promises to lure the planned 50,000 high-paying jobs to town.
Also at VentureBeat and The Verge.
Related: Cities Desperate to Become the Location of Amazon's "Second Headquarters"
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Amazon Receives 238 Proposals for HQ2, Including Multi-Billion Dollar Incentive Offers
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 03 2017, @01:43AM
From the second linked article:
You'd think a Halo alpha tester would want a better gaming rig.
Maybe if they weren't wasting so much time meditating, they could finally implement record-locking instead of dumping all changes with no recovery if 2 people are editing the same record. How many decades has record-locking been understood? And why do corporations pay out the ass for that shit when a second-year computer science student could roll a better solution?
So you cram them all into a confined space because you're gonna get back in square footage costs the productivity you're gonna lose from millennials bullshitting and Facebooking all day? Who the fuck would rather work on only a laptop on a tiny-ass lunch table when they could sit at a desk with a dual-monitor workstation and with room to lay out all their hard-copy and hand-draw diagrams on the fly?
I never understood what was wrong with the good ol' cubicle. They are smaller than "open spaces", cheap, and yet allow the worker to have their own personal space in which they can have their own small whiteboard and space for a small bookshelf and maybe a few pictures of the ol' family pinned to the wall. They have a space to hang the nice shirts to be put on in a hurry when customers pull surprise visits, and there's always the conference rooms when physically open space is necessary.