Comment Availability and Responsiveness (Score 1) 529
The real metric they should have looked at - since it's the main complaint of the managers - was availability. Availability needs are different for different aspects of work. The other half of that is responsiveness: getting the answers and clearances for your work from the stake holders involved.
Neither of those things have anything to do with location.
In my previous job, a lot of deployments were done in the wee hours of the night, and the fact that most of us were telecommuters meant that communication wasn't any different form a normal work environment.
Yahoo's real problem is that nobody without a legacy attachment to it needs it at all.