July 20, 2004
Quote of the Day
One of the then new private co-location facilities I had in mind when I mentioned them yesterday was PAIX in Palo Alto, California. This was one of the .com boom beautiful creations. By Cromm, what a facility! I've never seen expensive track lighting in a raised-floor facility before, or since. The Cisco campus in San Jose, or @Home in Redwood City, those were beautiful and fun because people worked there. Beauty in a co-location facility is a pointless expense better spent on infrastructure, in my not so humble opinion, but I may be the only person who cares. Isn't beauty for its own sake, even if no one sees it, important too?
A well designed network isn't fancy, it doesn't embody the latest and greatest. That's for marketing droids. A beautiful network is embodied in its simplicity of design, in as minimal a number of different protocols as possible, in its invisibility. Much like traditional Japanese architecture, I think. Like air, it should just be there as needed. If the users know it's there, it's because it has affected them in some way they didn't expect, and that is bad.
Curt Howland
Posted by Russell Whitaker at July 20, 2004 12:24 AM | TrackBack