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IN THE MIDDLEA Christmas Story: Santa Sleighs Federal Expressby Bruce Robertson |
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Logistics? Again, pre-fetch is the key. Certainly, realistic delivery involves a great deal of caching of products more local to the child who is receiving them. In no other way could every child receive gifts right at the same
time on Christmas morning. Caching can occur at appropriate times during the preceding days or months. For some trees (like mine), the cache gets loaded only a few days prior to opening. For other trees (my sister-in-law's), the cache is created during the year and completed no later than Thanksgiving. I think my mother-in-law forgets some of her cached items, and finds them years later and puts them out for delivery. One wonders if there are presents lost in local caches throughout the land, in a limbo of giving, hoping for release. (No doubt, as holiday retail figures attest, there's a great deal of cashing going on elsewhere as well during this period.)
Santa's Marketing Department Given that there are more mundane ways to explain how Santa does it, we've got to admit he's paid for some heavy marketing to convince people he's still doing magic. Someone once said, "Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic." The Santa Claus corollary to this is, "Proper marketing can easil y obfuscate simple technology, elevating the basic achievement of service to the status of magic." So it is with SDS. Santa's Middleware Santa's system illustrates many of the benefits of good middleware. Middleware should indeed create at least the illusion of simultaneous delivery if required by the application. In fact, better middleware often means pre-fetching results so that they can appear more immediately to the viewer. Caching is certainly a common option, particularly visible now in Web environments. Not trying to send the whole thing at once is another approach. Better replication solutions certainly do incremental updates and don't require retransmitting the entire file just because one record has changed. Moreover, Santa's infrastructure is carefully planned. He's put together a multitier delivery system with added value along the chain. He does not do all the work at the North Pole; that would require servers so massive they don't even exist. Instead, I'm fairly sure his elves are more designers than assembly-line technicians, and their designs are sent to the big factories across the globe. This spares massive trucks from driving the treacherous North Pole roadways in bad weather. One might say this is sending the metadata instead of the data. Or, breaking presents down to their component vector descriptions (plans) and sending those over the slower links. I'm not sure, but Santa may actually outsource some of his elf work; I've visited a large toy company or two, and noticed that they really do seem to have design work going on. Besides, would an elf actually design Barbie? Wrapping It All Up Look, if you don't believe any of this, then you can't believe in Christmas. If you don't buy it, thenÉ well, actually we all do a whole lot of buying around this time, don't we? But I'm not prepared to ignore the evidence of Christmas delivery. We see it every year. It never f ails. Heck, even the Grinch couldn't stop it. I'm suggesting that we believe Santa Claus is not actu ally so incredibly advanced in technology, but rather, he has a darn good marketing department. (Maybe even better than Microsoft's, though that might be pushing it.) No wonder my January credit card bills are so outrageous. Still, I'm haunted by the theory that this entire Santa Claus thing is a myth. That Santa is vaporware, and elves are agent technology still on some science-fiction author's drawing board. Yet, my kid likes the magic part. It serves my purposes (family harmony) to believe (or at least continue to uphold the illusion) that Santa lives. We're all suckers for good marketing. Even when it doesn't have much to do with reality. We often perpetuate it. I certainly hope we can enjoy this Christmas magic without believing all the marketing hype. Bruce Robertson is a program director with the META Group's Global Networking Strategies service. He can be reached at BruceR@metagroup.com. |
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Updated December 6, 1996
