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Dell Sales team told to return to office 5 days a week
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Why should they care though? It's not like commercial real estate sells more computers. Staff still needs desktops, infrastructure still needs datacenters.
Because all these companies have a shit load of money in the market including real state...
So sell it
That's the crux of the issue.
Who's going to buy it for a high price, if there is no demand for office space, because workers are all remote?
So burn it!
Property damage is an extremely effective way to fight against money. We should be doing it a lot more.
Cloud infrastructure is great for this. You don't need your own data center when you can just rent space on a farm. As a bonus, it's less work for the IT team who no longer have to deal with server hardware upkeep.
This is what is so fascinating to me about most people, they don't understand that companies hord their assets in my different kinds of investments when they are this large. Having real estate gives them an asset they can can store large sums of money in that generally appreciate in value over time. If a company is under finacial duress, they can fire a bunch of employees, then sale the land where those employees worked and and save themselves from much larger losses on revenue for a given time period.
Both major companies I've worked for sold their commercial real estate and leased it back as one of their very first measures when cost cuts were needed. What we have here is essentially the reverse where tech companies scare off their workforce and industry knowledge and drive up employee costs so they can impart some secondary effect on the commercial real estate market... so yes i remain confused about the priorities in play here.