headquarter

The real difference is that they are operated by Chinese nationals who don't have a Western headquarter to report to.

It usually prevents the business' core from going away (if Microsoft moves the headquarter to London or Seattle for instance).

Finland is not 'Nokia headquarter', Cambridge is not 'research', and India is not 'outsourcing'.

In most other places GoogFaceSoft engs are the guy the headquarter outsourced to, and that is a dramatic shift in stress/job satisfaction.

These internet giants chose to put their headquarter in a small EU country that chose to lower the taxes to attract companies.

It took me 3 hours to upload a 1G file (and I'm in Shenzhen, where Tencent headquarter is located).

Spent a year living and working in TLV [1], my employer has its corporate headquarter in that area (excuse me trying to avoid naming something specific in public).

You might as well ask why tech companies don't set up elsewhere and start their own little versions of Silicon Valley instead of spending $$$ to headquarter in SF.

How much time Quora founders are going to spend at YC headquarter during the program?

And they are restricted in decision making process for having to taking order from oversee headquarter, thus losing to the local companies in terms of faster response to the market.

If the company is american, then what I emphasized doesn't apply at all, it's absolutely normal that most things must be done the american way, and selecting people for their ability to speak with the headquarter makes sense.

Even if a group doesn't want to ultimately headquarter there due to distance from end-users/investors/whatever, set up a place where groups/duos/individuals can come for retreats (2 days --> 6 months, whatever you desire).

I know economists talk about people choosing places to live in terms of "amenities," and businesses want to headquarter where people want to live.

We moved our whole headquarter on dual stack a while ago, and periodically I'm turning off IPv4 on my laptop to check what the "user experience" would be with IPv6-only...

There are more examples, generally to the overall attitude: ‘better ask for foregiveness than permission’, rephrased as (and plastered all over their headquarter as essential values): “Move fast, break things”.