When you invite new friends from the firm to dinner on a Friday night, the first thing you do is give them a tour of your house: “This is the foyer. … We refinished the fireplace last month. … Wine from the cellar, anyone?”
Well, it seems the corporate world is adopting this tradition on a massive scale. With a little help from the Web, companies and firms are starting to open their doors too, giving journalists and consumers a peek at the inner workings of their businesses.
For starters, Amazon Inc. recently gave Jason Del Ray for the blog AllThingsD a tour of one of four warehouses in Phoenix. Yes, this is the place all of your legal gadgets bought on Amazon.com come from, or at least a similarly designed building. Del Ray calls the 1.2 million square foot operations facility a “real-life version of the Chutes and Ladders board game.” It looks like the place runs akin to a library––it even has a designated space to put products when one is found on the floor, so it doesn’t get lost in the building’s expansive shelving system.
Other companies have followed Amazon’s lead. Over the summer Microsoft Inc. gave Business Insider a tour of its 120-building, more-like-a-town-than-a-campus headquarters in Redmond, Wash. In October, Google Inc. let reporters into its headquarters after some initial pushback from PR, resulting in this compilation of Insider photos, speckled with some Reuter’s images taken a few years back.
However neither Microsoft nor Google has allowed reporters to document the business process like Amazon has––and let’s face it, iconoclastic shipping lines are much more impressive than cartoonish Android statues on the front lawn. The legal department doesn’t like to hear it, but sometimes it pays off to take a risk. Here’s to hoping future tours of Microsoft’s and Google’s headquarters will be a little more substantive.
Angela Hunt is a freelance writer based in New York City. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @AngNHunt. LTN Twitter: @lawtechnews.
