If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary.

Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.

The problem is that then you have to make sure workers feel secure about moving to work for you. So good pay, good local environment and most importantly a secure job because if they get laid off they'll have to move their whole family somewhere else.

Some companies do it (Walmart I believe) but most tech companies tend to base themselves in relatively large cities with other tech firms.

I remember a couple of years ago that people were saying Amazon had trouble hiring because even in tech-hubs they had run out of qualified people who would want to work for them.

The problem is that the venn diagram of executives willing to cut office costs and executives willing to stomach paying "above market rate" is two completely distinct circles. There's many ways companies could make it work, but the number of ways they're willing to consider is dramatically smaller.