I could be convinced to commute to a satellite office that's not affected by rush hour traffic. There's a lot of real estate available in the burbs. These don't really exist though, and their expense far outweighs their benefits.

The problem is that companies expect employees to be mobile when they are not. It's called putting down roots for a reason. Pulling kids out of school, buying a new house is very disruptive.

... or I can hook up my cable modem and work anywhere in the country...

Corporate elites cannot have their cake and eat it too.

Choose one:

1) Make housing affordable, and schooling more effective. Streamline the moving process through law and process improvements. Make transportation systems work better. Improve 2nd and 3rd tier cities social and political life.

2) Let people work from home. Suffer a 10-15% degredation in communications.

3) Have the entire industry force people to come to the office - have miserable workers.

For me option 2 seems to be what will happen - you'll get a control loop where companies will hemorrhage their best workers if they force back to office.