I was invited to an employee feedback session at Microsoft. We were asked to discuss teamwork and collaboration and float any ideas we had for changes that could be made to improve them. There were plenty of ideas, none of them involved open offices. Strangely, the consultants running the session used "different workspaces" as an example several times. After it showed up on the slides for the fourth time, I brought up the rumours about moving to open offices and said I thought it would harm productivity and wouldn't have a noticable effect on collaboration. Private offices with whiteboards and enough space for 3-4 people to stand and talk are fantastic for collaboration as-is. Several other attendees voiced their agreement. I don't recall anyone advocating for open offices. When the session ended I suggested to the senior Microsoft representative there that a survey be conducted to gauge engineer's preferences on work spaces. He said those decisions weren't in his hands (almost certainly true). I never did get such a survey.
The open offices that I did see at Microsoft were actually pretty nice - they were discrete spaces with room for ~25 desks and 2-3 meeting rooms attached. Certainly better than the spaces I've seen at startups, but still not close to individual offices in terms of pleasantness.
As for a reason, I suspect it's the same reason they unified dev and test into a single discipline. "Because that's what Facebook does."
The open offices that I did see at Microsoft were actually pretty nice - they were discrete spaces with room for ~25 desks and 2-3 meeting rooms attached. Certainly better than the spaces I've seen at startups, but still not close to individual offices in terms of pleasantness.
As for a reason, I suspect it's the same reason they unified dev and test into a single discipline. "Because that's what Facebook does."