Today on a visit to Microsoft, our hosts took us on a tour of Seattle. One highlight was a stop at the very first Starbucks store. Unlike the strangely plastic artificial homeyness of typical Starbucks venues — which all look a bit like what aliens might put together to simulate an air of coziness after having studied our species from a distance of ten light years — this store really does have a genuinely old fashioned feel to it.
It has the kind of worn down deep grained old wood counters that you can’t replicate in a chain store, and rows of shelves on the walls that aren’t trying to make any impression at all, which is exactly why they do. The real thing is so much more charming than the fake precisely because it isn’t trying to be charming.
After I had left the store, my Microsoft hosts asked me what I had thought of the place. Reaching for the appropriate analogy, I think I stumbled the right image. I told them that it was a bit like holding in one’s hands the very first release of MS-DOS. 🙂
Nostalgic for the edlin days, are we? 🙂
I was a TECO man myself.
That was before I moved on to modern tools, like
vi.