[joezydeco]

It's the most common kneejerk reaction to employees that complain that the open office is too noisy - that loud conversations in the room or, hell, right over your shoulder are distracting you from focusing properly on your work.

Instead of investigating the social fixes to the problem (asking people to take phone calls in private rooms, having arguments/meetings in private rooms, enabling sidetone in noise-cancelling headphones so people don't scream into conference calls), the proposed answer is a Simple Little Widget(tm) they can buy that will fix everything: the white noise generator.

Except now you have a layer of white noise on top of all the loud conversations. And white noise doesn't mask human speech at all unless it's louder than the speech itself. So nothing is fixed.