Office building owners, struggling with relatively anemic demand, may find some measure of comfort in Yahoo's decision to rein in its work-from-home employees and mandate their return to the cube-world. Is this the start of a trend reversal that could increase occupancies and buoy rents among office tenants? Probably not, although the Yahoo move may give some CEOs in other companies pause about letting home-officing get out of hand. Certainly for creativity and strategy-related jobs the benefits of having teams inter-mix and bounce ideas off each other will be realized better in face-to- face environments. And it goes without saying that most successful senior management teams work in proximity—like down the corridor or somewhere within the still very necessary company headquarters—to foster esprit de corps and make sure everyone is operating in concert.

But allowing workforce flexibility can build morale and many numbers crunching and sales jobs can be done productively and effectively from anywhere with managers able to keep track of work flow thanks to various technologies. There's no reason to pay up for leasing more space and force people into unnecessarily time consuming and expensive commuting when you don't need to. Meanwhile mobile phoning and information transmission steadily improve to keep separated employees more closely linked and in synch with the company culture.

For many years now, I've said the office has become less important and necessary, but it isn't going away. The Yahoo move stands testament to the limits of virtual-ness. Nevertheless I'd expect to see more people working outside of traditional offices, more jobs outsourced to people working away from company bastions, and less space provided per capita for people who do work in offices. In the meantime, wireless technologies and clouds eliminate requirements or substantially reduce the need for computer rooms, filing cabinets and other storage space. That need is not coming back and neither are large corner offices.