[throwaway201103]

You might be right for the smaller company where physical access to the machines in the data center is necessary at a certain point in the troubleshooting process. I work at such a place myself. I would guess, however, that Google moved beyond that quite some time ago. It's simply not practical, with or without having offices with people in them.

[marcan_42]

All the access to the services is remote, but I'd say having the entire team in the same room does help coordinate incident response.

[herodoturtle]

Agreed. And I'd hope that their plan B of "get the whole team on Hangouts" isn't met with connection / auth issues. Kinda feel bad for the googlers. Hope they get this right.

[marcan_42]

When I was there they had an IRC network for this reason. I hope they still do. Not quite the same as VoIP but fewer dependencies...

[kuschku]

That's why the network folks at Google and AWS use IRC for just that purpose. Simple, no external dependencies, just works.