It's just much cheaper, and often you don't even need one seat per worker. So the gamble is that "sure, people hate it, but we save so much money by making the office shittier that we can afford a slight dump in productivity per worker".

It's not that they actually think it's good - that's just something they pretend so that they don't have to tell the truth. The truth is that they made a calculation and concluded that having happy employees just wasn't worth it.

I think companies tend to underestimate the value of happy employees.

At the time, open office space was supposed to create a better environment for collaboration and as alternative to the dreaded cubicles.

This was also in time where people would send physical paperwork to each other through an internal mail system from one cubicle to another. Like there'd be an assistant to carry paper around.

It also made the office sizes more flexible.

It might work for people who desperately need to bounce their creative ideas off each other, but for anyone else it just plain sucks.