"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Edifice Complex - Cringely on technology:

The bigger question [on building a new multi-million dollar Apple HQ on the site of the old H-P offices], though, is whether the plan bodes ill for Apple’s future as a company? Silicon Valley history suggests that such big building projects are not a good thing.

It is usually referred to as an Edifice Complex, this need for successful technology companies to plow huge amounts of cash into elaborate over-designed building projects. Borland, Exodus, Excite@Home, Netscape, WebTV, SGI, Palm and Yahoo all built ultra-modern state-of-the-art office and lab complexes shortly before they went into decline or dropped out of business entirely. Borland spent $90 million on an amazing development in Scotts Valley that never completely opened, the company crashed so fast. SGI’s striking campus today houses the best-known pieces of Google, the search giant getting credit for Jim Clarke’s architectural vision.

Only Oracle with its silver cylinders in Redwood Shores seems to have been able to defeat the build-then-fade syndrome which goes far beyond the list of companies in my last paragraph.

It’s not clear exactly what kind of corporate hubris makes this happen, but almost every dramatic corporate HQ in the Bay Area that was originally owned, not rented, tends to have been built by a company that no longer exists. Maybe they were too busy building to keep minding the store. Whatever the case, its enough to tell me that real estate is probably a bad investment for any high tech company.