To make a difference one must be at the headquarters, must come to the office, must sit through meetings. Microsoft has employees scattered around the globe, but nearly everyone whose job is to plan or develop software works within a mile of Bill Gates's office. The basic units of the working day are collaborative meetings, scheduled in blocks of one or more hours, where people argue over what features to include in a program or how to get rid of certain bugs. Much of the company's work occurs in planned or unplanned gatherings around a whiteboard. Between the meetings are hallway conversations or talks in the cafeteria, where nearly everyone eats nearly every day.
People do work on their own.
The developers, who do the actual software coding, may hole up for days to work on certain features. The program managers, who are supposed to itemize the tricks the developers will make a program do, may also vanish, to finish program specifications. But it seemed as if the company was as dependent as a football team on having its members at the same place at the same time. Or maybe it suggests some skepticism about the extent to which workplaces will ever become virtual. In 1995 Gates famously ordered the company to reverse course and take the Internet seriously.