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I am off to Texas for my cousin’s wedding, so I wrote 8 blog entries in 24 hours while still getting my real job done.
Promised the family I wouldn’t take my computer so for the next 96 hours no more blog posts.
I’ll have my iPhone, so I could twitter and blog from it, but that’s too painful, and I am not going to blog pictures of my kids in the wedding. :-)
I apologize for those of you looking for data center news. I am taking a tangent to make a point of religious wars like batteries vs. fly-wheels, air vs. liquid cooling. People will argue for what is proper design. But, sometimes there are business issues that over rule proper design.
Verdana was my crazy idea, and I wrote Story of Verdana Part 1 on Getting in Trouble.
Part 2 is about religious wars arguing what is proper design. This happens in the data center often. To illustrate the senseless arguing, look at this Times article that discusses the attacks on Ikea for using Verdana.
The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Verdana
By LISA ABEND Friday, Aug. 28, 2009
Workers fixing the logo of Swedish furniture chain Ikea
Jens-Ulrich Koch / AFP / Getty
Thumbing through his local Swedish newspaper, Göteborg resident Mattias Akerberg found himself troubled by a full-page advertisement for Ikea. It wasn't that the Grevbäck bookcases looked any less sturdy, or that the Bibbi Snur duvet covers were any less colorful, or even that the names given to each of the company's 9,500 products were any less whimsical. No, what bothered Akerberg was the typeface. "I thought that something had gone terribly wrong, but when I Twittered about it, people at their ad agency told me that this was actually the new Ikea font," he recalls. "I could hardly believe it was true."
How hot was the topic? Verdana is getting more tweets than Ted Kennedy.
"Ikea, stop the Verdana madness!" pleaded Tokyo's Oliver Reichenstein on Twitter. "Words can't describe my disgust," spat Ben Cristensen of Melbourne. "Horrific," lamented Christian Hughes in Dublin. The online forum Typophile closed its first post on the subject with the words, "It's a sad day." On Aug. 26, Romanian design consultant Marius Ursache started an online petition to get Ikea to change its mind. That night, Verdana was already a trending topic on Twitter, drawing more tweets than even Ted Kennedy.
In the below video, the urgency to choose Futura over Verdana is a life and death decision. :-)
The arguing from the type and design community is an argument over design, but they miss a functional strength of Verdana, its character set is int’l and free to use.
So why would Ikea make such a change? The very ubiquity of Verdana seems to be part of the font's appeal. Freely distributed by Microsoft, the typeface allows Ikea to use the same font in all countries and with many alphabets. "It's more efficient and cost-effective," says Ikea spokeswoman Monika Gocic. "Plus, it's a simple, modern-looking typeface."
Yes, there are better designs, but when it comes down to the economics and ease of use as a Windows system font Verdana has larger character set than designer fonts, and it is free. Free. So, as much as the type and design community argues their religious issues about design, can they say that there will be one more piece of Ikea furniture sold with a better typeface like Futura? No!
It is much easier for online and print now that Verdana is the standard typeface. Don’t get me started on font metrics, and reflowing text. This was too much part of my prior life, and glad it in the past. I’d rather discuss data center metrics.
Keep this story in mind the next time you are in a data center discussion and there is a religious battle over the technology used to power and cool the data center. Are you having a Futura vs. Verdana argument?
Working on Green Data Centers can be a little frustrating at times, pushing for changes to do the right thing. One of the regular stories I enjoy telling is the story of Verdana.
The Verdana typeface family consists of four TrueType fonts created specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display. Designed by world renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and hand-hinted by leading hinting expert, Agfa Monotype’s Tom Rickner, these sans serif fonts are unique examples of type design for the computer screen.
The Verdana family resembles humanist sans serifs such as Frutiger, and Edward Johnston’s typeface for the London Underground, and Carter himself claims to see the influence of his own Bell Centennial in the face. But to label Verdana a humanist face is to ignore the fact that this family isn’t merely a revival of classical elegance; this is type designed for the medium of screen.
But, Dave why should I listen to your story as you are not referenced in any of the Verdana material? Because I can tell you how the pieces fit together and the bigger story of the social network required to get the font done in an environment that was against Verdana. Also, I was the one who brought Matthew and Tom to the Verdana project as I had worked with both while I was at Apple and knew I wanted the best to work on Verdana. A tidbit from Tom’s meticulous note taking.
7/26/1994 Later in the afternoon, Dave Ohara called, with Matthew Carter and Tom Stephens in the room, to talk about the Verdana face. Matthew said that he was sad to read my note the other day, but found out soon after that we would still get a chance to work together on the Verdana face.
So, let’s start off when the first time I got in trouble for Verdana. One afternoon, my Microsoft general manager Steve Shaiman came looking for me, and he yelled “what the hell did you do?” What? BillG (Bill Gates email alias, back then we called people by their email alias, I was DaveO) thinks we should be doing fonts for screen and Pan-European typefaces.
I didn’t talk to Bill or send him e-mail. How did he find out about my typeface idea? Steve explained I talked to Peter Pathe. Yeh, I was walking through building 16 in the morning and ran into Peter who was my hiring manager into Microsoft, and the general manager of Word at the time. Steve continues you told Peter your idea for typefaces for the screen and pan-European. Well, he asked me what I was up to, and I told him. It turns out Peter had a BillG review for Word later that morning, and Bill asked Peter who was the ex-TrueType Director “what’s new in fonts?” Peter said we are looking at fonts for the screen and pan-European character sets. Bill said that’s a great idea!
What’s the problem? My general manager Steve Shaiman, typographer Robert Norton, TrueType Architect Eliyezer Kohen, and many others had no involvement with this project, and had current plans to digitize hundreds of typefaces Microsoft had licensed for preserving historical typefaces, bringing the rich history of type to the Win3.1 user base with more font packs.
Uhh, what users wanted this?
This was just the start of the internal battles to ship Verdana. Why were there battles? Verdana was a disruptive typeface that changed the typeface development models and who was in charge. How serious was the disruption? This was the last typeface I ever worked on, and I was asked to leave the group as I refused to cave in to the politics. Leaving type was one of the best career decisions I made. As time has proven the ideas were right and social networking was a power that was difficult to beat.
The viral strength of the ideas and network of people is the story I am going to tell. This is part 1. Part 2 is on the people who were involved and their relationships. The relationships of the team, the network effects are what the “plan of record” could not stop. And, now users recognize Georgia, Tahoma, Calibri, and the infamous Comic Sans were all developed for the screen.
Story behind a Viral Font, Comic Sans
WSJ has a front page article about the typeface Comic Sans. I can give you an interesting insider story on this as I worked in this group at Microsoft and can provide some history.
Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will
By EMILY STEEL
Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.
Vincent Connare
Thanks to Microsoft shipping Arial, Helvetica is history far many and a movie.
Who cares that Microsoft didn’t ship those other 300 historical typefaces it licensed.
In these times, the typeface in your browser, iPhone, and Blackberry are more important.
Fonts for the screen wasn’t a bad idea, just a little controversial in 1994.
Mike changes so often here is the latest on his job change.
Talking to a few friends we were discussing Mike Manos's running Digital Realty Trust's POD development. The conversations was, “Oh did you hear. He got more. He did??? What? Mike got Operations, Operation Engineering, and Future Innovation with Jim Smith the CTO. Hey doesn't this look like the way Mike organized his group at Microsoft? Yes it does. And, now he reports to the CEO.”
As we look to the challenges ahead we are faced with the kinds of problems all companies wish they had. We are challenged by an increased amount of customer demand for capacity coupled with a desire for the most technologically advanced facilities in the market today. Additionally new offerings such as Pod Architecture Services is giving us visibility and penetration into opportunities that historically we could not be a part of. This considerable growth is combined with an increasing amount of complexity in managing a world-wide facility portfolio of tens of facilities with power capacity that is measured in the hundreds of megawatts!
Mike has used his organizational skills to pull a team together that rivals will have a hard to match. Why? Because Mike can perform data center organizational magic, and people like to work for him.
You may not have thought as Digital Realty Trust as a construction company, and they aren't a typical construction management solution. They are out to drive a change in the data center industry by looking at the TCO to provide data center services. This may not be as sexy as watching Apple and Google data center moves, but it is going to drive significant changes.
One of the changes coming through the industry is combination of IT with Facilities/Real Estate in Site Selection, Design, and Construction of Data Centers. There are data center rules ready to be broken as others figure out how much these rules limit and increase data center costs. We are about to see data centers built in totally different ways in places you would not typically consider. In this recession, there are huge opportunities for those who can see a different way of business to take advantage of the economic incentives by federal, state, and local gov’t.
Here is a tough question I haven’t seen many people ask. We have these long list of site selection and design criteria, how do each of these criteria affect the TCO of our data center? If we are going to have a lower TCO shouldn’t we question the requirements and understand how much it costs.
You mean I could lower my TCO by changing the requirements? Well, yeh. Don’t you think that is easier to do, than adopting the latest technology with the hope of a high ROI.
There are a few who are thinking this way, and it is fun discussing how data center costs could be dramatically lower than the competition. You know Google thinks this way, but we usually have to wait 3 years before they share their ideas.
I think Mike sees the way things are shifting, and has a vision which is why he has acted so quickly at Digital Realty Trust.
Are you ready?
Thanks to high visibility companies and the media, data centers are now a well known topic. Google and Microsoft competing. Amazon’s silence. Apple’s $1 billion dollar data center have all contributed to data centers now being something interesting to talk about.
Data centers are now hip, cool, and maybe even sexy to some to know some of the secrets of what is being built. You are now part of the club, and the club is an exclusive set of people who make the data center decisions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and critical for future business growth.
The make-up of this club used to be predominantly the real estate facilities team, but more often you are seeing IT staff having more votes. Which makes absolute sense as they are the users of the data center not facilities. When you talk to real estate, facilities, and data center operations about the services running in the data center, few know any details of what is running in the buildings.
The hard-core data center crowd would be offended by a term like being “hip”. And, Rich Miller makes an interesting comparison to “fight club.” Rich first brought up fight club analogy in June 3, 2006.
Wal-Mart, Data Centers and The Fight Club Rule
June 3rd, 2006 : Rich Miller“The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is - you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.”
Some companies take the Fight Club approach with their data centers. You DO NOT talk about the data centers. One of these companies is Wal-Mart, which has piqued the curiosity of the media with its closed-mouth response to curiosity about the company’s 125,000 square foot data center in Joplin, Mo. The Joplin Globe describes it as a “building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won’t even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.” Wal-Mart gladly supplied them with more ammunition. “This is not something that we discuss publicly,” Wal-Mart senior information officer Carrie Thum told the paper. “We have no comment. And that’s off the record.”
The Globe isn’t afraid to speculate, however:
Wal-Mart’s ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.
Rich goes on telling another example.
I once got a call from a large institution insisting that we not identify the state in which their data center was located. Not the street address mind you, the state. This person felt that even identifying the state presented a security risk. What made this even stranger was that this organization had purchased the facility through a bankruptcy auction, and the sale agreement (including the address) was a public record. The Fight Club approach doesn’t work too well once that much information is public, but some facility operators will persist in invoking it anyway.
As tax incentives get thrown around in bigger numbers more information is in the public records, and tax payers are demanding to see the benefits of funding data center construction in their local community.
Whether you are a “fight club” or a “hip” group, keep in mind the more tax incentives you receive the public is wanted to have a peak inside.
![[Vincent Connare]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GN597_Connar_BV_20090416161747.gif)
