[zach]

Honestly, I'm surprised Jason Fried and DHH haven't picked up on this news trend to point out how bizarre it is that these companies still bus people around at 40 MPH instead of their communication at the speed of light.

Isn't this just another argument for the innovative promise of remote work? That both the old centralized model of the company town, and the hub-and-spoke suburban campus model, impose all kinds of costs and limitations on employees and the community as well as the company? It's surely impressive that certain companies have become cultural forces in their region, but it's not always eventually a good thing (see the Great Lakes area), and the inevitable cultural conflicts are bloody and never-ending.

Also, I wonder if other parts of the continent (whom would probably buy Google the buses to transport people in or out of their city) laugh or cry when they read about these first-world-economy problems.

[thwarted]

It seems that it is currently more efficient to bus people around, using (abusing, some might say) the infrastructure that already exists than to battle municipalities and telcos to provide/get/allow-you-to-install higher speed network connectivity.

[zach]

Good point, and it is a long game, although Google doesn't yet seem to be incentivizing people to move to Kansas City. And the buses are a good testbed for an autonomous vehicle fleet, like how Uber dispatches human-driven cars today in order to grow the market for 3-7 years from now.

In the post-WW2 era, suburbs like Irvine here in the LA area built up a large economy by providing growing industries with land use they couldn't find in the metropolis. And the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System provided an infrastructure that citizens appreciated and trucking companies were able to use to diversify goods movement. Maybe forward-looking municipalities or larger government entities have an opportunity to enable further economic progress by providing superior access to high-speed connectivity.