|
THE old Rackspace headquarters was stuffed to thegills. In 2007 the company, which offers cloud-computing and web-hosting services, had morethan 1,000 employees in downtown San Antonio.People were crammed at folding tables in thehallway. They often had to go to a differentbuilding or shuttle around the lifts to talk to peoplein other departments. Rackspace公司总部的旧楼曾人满为患。该公司提供云计算和主机托管服务，2007年在圣安东尼奥市区已拥有1000多名员工。公司走廊里放了很多折叠桌，连这里都挤满了人。要是想找其他部门的人谈点事，都得跑到另一栋楼或者坐几个来回的升降梯才行。 Still, when Graham Weston, the companys co-founder and chairman, suggested that theymove into a shopping mall, staff were sceptical. The mall was vacant. Its site, the encircledsuburb of Windcrest, was slightly grotty, not least because of the huge dead mall right offthe highway. 即便如此，当公司的创建人之一兼主席Graham Weston表示他们要搬到一家购物中心时，员工们都还将信将疑。那时候商场是空置的，地点位于Windcrest这个被包围着的郊区，外观不太好看，相当重要的原因是这座空无一人的大型商场正位于公路的出口处。 Building a campus from scratch, however, would have taken several years at least. Anyway,the place was cheap. Nobody wants a mall any more, says John Engates, the chieftechnology officer. Except Rackspace, and others like it, who have come to see a dead mallas a blank canvas. In 2008 it opened its new headquarters, and won a prize for communityeconomic development. Now it has more than 3,000 workers on site, withplans to hirehundreds more by the end of the year. | 
