Moving to Amsterdam?

I wanted to post this earlier, but somehow I've postponed it till now. Some of you may have heard it already, but the department I'm working for at Vodafone is moving from Maastricht to Amsterdam, which is about 214km away. The rationale behind it is that we are too far away from the Randstad, away from most of our customers and external parties, and because it's hard to hire specialized personnel (since most of them don;t want to live/work in Limburg). There are going to be two "waves", one in August 2008, and one in August 2010, with a total of about 400 commercial/marketing functions moving to the new location. We won't know for sure who is in which wave until the 1st of December, though the general opinion is that our department at least is going to move in 2008.

For a lot of people, this came as quite a shock. There will be a lot of people who will decide not to move with the company, especially those who have a family with kids. I haven't decided for myself yet what I'm going to do, but I think there's a good probabillity that I'm going to move to Amsterdam as well, though my opinion on that is changing from day to day. There's only a problem regarding my apartment. I just bought it 9 months ago, and after some thought, I decided not to sell my apartment in any case, since I would make too much loss on it. If I am able to rent it, then the choice for Amsterdam would be easier.

Apart from what it means for the people directly involved, I think this is a bad thing from a socio-economic point of view. The general trend is that companies are moving their commercial headquarters to the Randstad. Even Philips, which I've always associated with Eindhoven, moved their HQ to Amsterdam a few years ago. One of the main reasons is that all the students want to work there. But then again, since all the companies are moving there, you are more or less forced to move there as well if you happen to work in that field. It's just a vicious cycle.

Still, for me personally, this might not be a bad thing necessarily. I', always thinking about the possibility of working elsewhere, so it's not like that I feel particularly attached to where I live. And if it's somwhow possible, I'd even like to work abroad as well in the future. The only difference is that I thought that I would stay here for a couple of years at least before I start looking someplace else, so this is basically just speeding up the whole process.