I don't think a month is nearly enough time to form any judgements. From personal experience, it takes about a year to really learn how to work out of an office.<p>Multiply this by an entire office and they're in for a world of hurt. To really successfully pull this off, they'd need a couple of fascists who already knew how to work remotely, people would need to defer to them, and they'd need a serious transition period to get used to all the tools they'll need (ie: work a day or two per week remotely).<p>The biggest problem they have, though, is one of measuring success. They don't really say what a successful experiment's going to look like. It's easy enough to measure writer output (quantity, not necessarily quantity), but most other facets of the business aren't quite as measurable. Even the success of writers is ultimately determined by the number of eyeballs on their stories. It's awfully hard to measure that stuff with any kind of reliability over the course of a month.<p>The best possible tool we've found for this is IRC. I assume Campfire would work reasonably well, but it's awfully simple to find bots that speak IRC and do useful things.
I call BS; $10 says they won't exist by summer. Initiatives like this are usually announced when it's time to cut costs. While a virtual office can be a wonderful thing, it imposes significant problems too: how are you going to train new hires? existing issues can perhaps be handled by teleconferencing, but do you really want to have brainstorming sessions and involved discussions about future strategy via IM (or whatever)? How do you keep your contributors from thinking to themselves 'I'm practically freelance anyway' or handle the work-life balance issues?<p>I'm not saying it can't work - I've been an enthusiast and advocate for telecommuting ever since I got a modem. But it's not a panacea, and it doesn't work in every employment context. Color me very skeptical.
I wonder if that is like cheating in a sense? I would think it's easier to work with people remotely who you have built relationships with. You understand them, you have seen how they operate in person and gain insights beyond what is spoken/written and have a certain common culture. I work with outsourcing/offshoring and now work remotely with a partner who used to be local. I don't think it would work if we hadn't spent all the face-to-face time first.