Hoping to foster creativity, tech companies put big bucks into office design

This May 11, 2012, file photo shows workers at the Facebook office in Menlo Park, Calif. Silicon Valley, it turns out, doesn’t revolve around the stock prices of Facebook and its playful sidekick, Zynga. Instead, the optimism in Silicon Valley can be seen in a variety of ways in this area that covers roughly 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco.

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Jeff Chiu/AP

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In this Feb. 5, 2007 file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg smiles in this office in Palo Alto, Calif. Zuckerberg turns 28 on Monday, May 14, 2012. He's considerably younger than the average FORTUNE 500 CEO, of course. But while some investors worry that Zuckerberg is too young to lead Facebook as a public company, experts point out that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell were in their 20s when their companies had IPOs.

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PAUL SAKUMA

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These days plenty of tech companies are investing good chunks of their fortunes into getting just the right look and feel to their offices. It's a trend the New York Times' deputy tech editor Quentin Hardy has been writing about and he joins us now.

In a couple of weeks, employees at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco will be eating lunch in a pair of old log cabins from the 1800s.

The cabins were originally part of remote ranches in small Montana towns. The architect tasked with designing Twitter's new offices says the cabins help evoke a forest theme, in keeping with the company's famous bird logo.

These days plenty of tech companies are investing good chunks of their fortunes into getting just the right look and feel to their offices. It's a trend the New York Times' deputy tech editor Quentin Hardy has been writing about and he joins us now.