Working from home is a concept that gladdens some hearts and makes others sink. Businesses feel the same, and make different choices. Some, like global campaigning group Avaaz or airline company JetBlue, embrace working from home. Others—most famously Yahoo—ban it.

Of course, the internet made instant mass communication, and scaleable home businesses, possible long ago, but some remote-working tools, like online hangouts, video conferencing and group work platforms, have only recently become good enough to function really well for large scattered teams.