I have read several news stories discussing the move of companies out of California. Such news feeds chatter about companies and residents leaving places because of politics, taxes, discontent, etc. But, the details in this one story suggest some companies are shifting some workers and activity while retaining operations in California.

“Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its corporate headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas,” the filing said. “We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work.”

The company already has a significant presence in Austin, opening a five-story, 560,000 square-feet campus overlooking Lady Bird Lake. It also has employment hubs in Redwood City, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington…

Oracle follows a handful of similar moves by California companies and high-profile business leaders leaving the state. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced he had moved to Austin last week at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit. His exodus followed months of bashing California for its handling of the pandemic. The billionaire CEO said he is maintaining company operations in California, but also has significant operations for Tesla and SpaceX in Texas…

HP Enterprise also announced its decision to relocate its headquarters from San Jose to the Houston suburb of Spring earlier this month. Palantir Technologies relocated from Palo Alto as well this year, landing in Denver. Tech giants Google and Apple have also been expanding their presence in Austin over the last several years.

Headquarters are important, particularly for cities. Attracting the headquarters of a major company is a big status symbol for any big city. See the interest in trying to attract Amazon’s second headquarters. The implication is that the new location has a favorable business climate and is on the rise (with the opposite assumed of the previous location).

But, headquarters are just part of a company. They may be the nerve center and the physical home of company executives. Yet, large companies today can have offices and plants all over the place connected to a headquarters elsewhere.

Another way to read the moves out of California above is to suggest that these companies are hedging their bets by being located in numerous advantageous locales. Having multiple locations can help take advantage of local tax breaks for particular purposes, build on local work forces, maintain their place in local social networks, and provide points to pivot around when conditions change. The headquarters may have moved but they may move again and the companies still see some value in keeping operations going in California (even if some of this is simply due to inertia).

This suggests a different future reality than one where cities serve as anchors for major corporations. Instead, major multinational corporations keep offices and facilities all over the place, ready to move when needed or when an opportunity arises. Austin and Houston might be attractive now, Miami or Denver in a few years (just sticking to US locations). And as cities continue to look for an edge over their competition, attracting another big company is important…even as that company is actually rooted in multiple locations.