Companies like IBM and Cisco, Microsoft and Apple, Google and Amazon, have been at the center of society’s digital transformation. Each one competes over its space in the market, and increasingly in the smart building age, each one competes over the quality of its space. New headquarters create a buzz around the company but also the whole industry and its new neighborhood. Large company campuses can impact the entire area in which it’s based, the influx of hundreds or thousands of employees can rejuvenate local businesses, encourage renovation of the district and the campus itself acts as a retail and entertainment hub for all those living and working nearby. A buzz also echos around the smart building industry itself, as expectations of futuristic urban spaces run wild when the richest technology companies rebuild. So the announcement of a 643,000-square-foot modernization of software giant Microsoft’s 32-acre Mountain View location in Silicon Valley, has the imaginations in […]