• AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    WeWork never made much sense. The entire business is just co-working spaces and regular office space rental. There’s nothing special about it at all.

    • RivenRise@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think the special part was having smaller rental spaces and that feeling of having coworkers in an office that weren’t actually your coworkers. I used to deliver to a lot of we work and we work type places and I sort of got the appeal for startups. Some definitely didn’t have privacy like another commenter mentioned.

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        And that’s a perfectly reasonable business, but nothing revolutionary.

        If their business would have been co-working franchises, in the sense that you can have an office everywhere and with some set standards, it could even have been a good business. But it’s low-margin, nothing like Google or Facebook.

        • Introversion@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Totally. But Adam Neumann wasn’t going to settle for “low-margin”, nosirree! Low margins don’t buy you jets and mansions.

      • Introversion@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        In the beginning, WeWork definitely was about renting to smaller companies (or individuals) at reasonable prices, providing decent (if not upscale) accomodations. That’s probably a decent little business.

        But their CEO had (or at least, promoted) delusions about WeWork providing a fundamentally different experience. Some of those delusions were IIRC software projects he claimed would allow renters to automate and improve their network and electricity use. He sold this bullshit on talk shows, and gave this as a reason that WeWork wasn’t just another renter of office space. In reality, they didn’t have the expertise to do anything like he claimed, and it all came to nought.

        Maybe if he hadn’t been spending money like a fleet of drunken sailors, much of it on himself or vanity projects, they might’ve not cratered as badly, or at least as quickly.

    • deejay4am@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      No no; you see - it was in the cloud.

      That means it should be patentable and it will provide 38% returns over four years. Trust me, bro.