Personal communication is better. People evolved to detect all sorts of subtlety in in person communication that you just can't detect when it's filtered through some other medium.
Lets say you have 10 million dollars at stake. If in personal communication is 10% better, and communication accounts for 10% of costs (i think both are higher than 10%), you're looking at saving 100k just by being near by. Suffer now to boom later.
Agreed. I find even a two-way conversation on Skype with blocky, stuttering video is noticeably more productive than a straight phone call. The internet really needs ubiquitous video conferencing. It should be as trivial to set up as a Skype call (which, to be honest, is not always that trivial), but multi-way, cross-platform and much better quality. Maybe Opera or Google could build it into their browsers...
Lets say you have 10 million dollars at stake. If in personal communication is 10% better, and communication accounts for 10% of costs (i think both are higher than 10%), you're looking at saving 100k just by being near by. Suffer now to boom later.