Instead of two headquarters, why not 50 headquarters? They have one of the largest and most reliable networks in the world - use it! With offices spread across the country (continent, even), they could hire from a talent pool that dwarfs Seattle and Denver. They wouldn't have to find 100+ contiguous acres for sale in one metropolis. City Council elections wouldn't have to be of strategic importance. Likewise for disaster preparedness. They already have distribution centers all over the place.
The same reason Google, Facebook, Apple, et all still bus employees 40 miles south from SF to their offices -- having people together in one office (or campus) makes them more productive, no matter how much technology you throw at it.
Most communication in an office still takes place virtually just as you do remotely. Within a company located in the same physical area you might communicate across floors, across buildings, across campuses.
Yes it is nice to have small groups together on regular basis in meetings, integration sessions, brainstorming but for the most part jobs are virtual even in an office today with chat, email, text, phones, video chat, etc. Everyone in one location is both a single point of failure and doesn't scale well to employees changes, i.e. people move frequently, skill is available in different technologies not always in one location, etc. Better virtual communication in companies even on-site is needed, being in one place without that can actually put a damper on performance and ability to ship.
Yet the evidence from major tech companies suggests that physical presence is worth the time and expense to bus most employees to a central campus. Apple is spending $5B on their new building to house 13,000 employees together. Amazon is committing $5B to their new campus to house 50,000 employees.
I think Amazon has reached the limits of Seattle -- Seattle can't build housing or transportation fast enough to match Amazon's growth, so starting somewhere fresh makes sense.
Plus there's the redundancy benefit -- if the Pacific Northwest suffers the catastrophic earthquake they are predicting, Amazon's HQ2 will live on (and make a fortune shipping supplies to the area).
Building a second HQ is horizontal scaling unless they plan to consolidate at the new location and continue vertical scaling from there. It sounds like they're actually distributing the HQ across two locations, not just building a specialized satellite office. (All of the mentioned companies have those.)
If computing works as an analogy, decoupling a system enough to spread across two servers without one being the true master/head is already half the battle. But you'd rarely design a distributed system only to run it on two servers. The synchronization overhead wipes out most of the gains. Once you have the architecture, you might as well move to commodity servers that are collectively cheaper and more powerful than two top-of-the-line servers.
I wonder if there is an organizational equivalent of the CAP theorem.
Is that really true? How many people in a 50,000-person campus ever even make eye contact, much less work together in a way that requires physical proximity?
I've always thought it curious as to why AWS requires people to relocate to one of their offices. My understanding was that one of the major benefits of the cloud (aka AWS) was to free companies from having to hire locally.
Kind of defeats the purpose of a "headquarters" - Even 2 is pushing it as an "HQ" is about where the primary decision makers will work on a day to day basis.
