Uh. I want free flow of information inside the company, or of certain kinds of information between companies (or company and general outsiders). You absolutely do not want to share your most sensitive company discussions with your direct competitors. There's also some information which is regulatorially or legally sensitive and can't be shared outside the company before "everyone" has access to it.

Another source of daily irony is I dislike open plan offices in general as a developer; I'm now more a product manager (although I do tech stuff as well, and conference papers, and such), which is a role which does strongly benefit from open plan, and I've also we've built monitorhenge at a pod of desks in open-plan, out of Seiki 39" 4K and portrait-mode 24" U2410 monitors. It's essentially a re-creation of my favorite work environment; a private office shared with a small team.

How did you seriously conflate sharing ideas with coworkers and sharing ideas with employees from other companies?