It's still a car focused suburban office park with an open office floor plan... No amount of love is going to change the fundamentals.
About the open office plan, I don't think that's the case at all. I don't know if we know enough about it to say, but I think enough is known to say it has a prototypical open office floor plan. Maybe if one were to be overly technical and argue that it is technically "open" then I would have no choice but to agree, however that's not really a common sense way of looking at things. It looks like the pods resemble something more akin to how whales organize. Plus I can't believe they'd spend so much time designing the hardware without giving the software some thought, if my analogy makes sense.
Indeed, I am currently looking out my window at several Amazon office towers that most employees didn't drive to.
The problem is we current have three choices:
- Cars
- "Company Store"-style housing (e.g. get fired, get made homeless)
- Good public transport.
The third option is obviously the best but it is outside of any single company's control. To get good quality public transport the entire city (or cities) need to be onboard, invest sometimes billions of dollars, and likely run it at a near loss (since most public transport systems lose money).
If someone knows of an alternative not listed above, I'd like to read about it. And, no, automated vehicles aren't an alternative because they don't actually exist in production yet.
The other thing they can do is what Google does: buy their own buses and bus in some of the employees from key locations. It's not exactly "public transport", but it's pretty close, and doesn't make anyone homeless if they lose their job there, and it wouldn't cost the company much, while it'd save a lot of cars from pouring emissions into the air every day.
They do that already. I work down the street from the current Apple headquarters and the sheer amount of Apple buses during commute hours is insane. They must come every few minutes from 8-10a and 4-7p or so, because its rare for me to see less than 2 or 3 within a couple blocks of HQ during those hours.