Consider that it took a pandemic to get many SV companies to consider this. Forget employees advocating for it or workplace research, some external event had to force their hand first.
In one generation we've gone from everyone has an office with a door (even Homer Simpson has one!), to cube farms, to open offices. I've seen all of these and don't recall a single transition where employees thought "this is great!"
The pandemic has made corporate leadership realize that people will continue to work and produce things no matter what, even if their kids are pulling on their arm all day, because they need to work to live.
Additionally the benefits to corporations are obvious, reduced real estate is the just the tip of the iceberg. We've already seen companies can start thinking about reducing salaries based on location (which I can assure you will eventually translate to reduced salaries everywhere, why pay a premium for someone to live in SF 3 years from now?), the talent pool is now nation wide (and soon global) which will again reduce salaries. It's much easier to identify people who were just taking up space in the office and remove them. With no offices corporate travel becomes completely unnecessary etc.
None of these advantages have anything to do with whether or not employees are happier, or even more productive.
If open offices taught us anything, employers seem to be obsessed with finding what's the absolute worst for the employee, their productivity, the company, the stock price and the quality of the output.
Also it's not merely an "experiment", we're talking about peoples' lives here. People aren't just fungible resources to be commanded and lorded over like chattel. Workers have been fighting for the freedom to work remotely for decades now, and it's sad that it takes a pandemic for employers to start respecting their employees enough to allow them the basic freedom of not being chained to their open office desks like zoo animals.
Turned out better for you, maybe, but not for everyone. There are plenty of people here on HN, including myself, who have said that they want to go back to the office, either full time or part time.
Yahoo was already down the drain at that point. Sounds like it was more about blaming the workers (and trying to shake things up) than anything else
Though to be fair, video conferencing systems at the time weren't great
I've never seen anyone make the claim that Mayer banned it because 'it wasn't working'. That's quite a revisionist history take.
"Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together."
[0] http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the...
Mayer's tenure at Yahoo wasn't exactly a great success...