The Future

“I’ve seen the future” sings Leonard Cohen, “and it’s murder.” Me too, but it looked like a hotel lobby. In particular, the lobby of the excellent W Silicon Valley, which is in Newark, just across the Dumbarton bridge from Sun’s Menlo Park office. My first meeting was early Monday so I flew down late Sunday and stayed at the W for the first time, despite the fact that Simon Phipps has been telling me to go there for months. Simon is right, I unhesitatingly recommend it. It’s a nice and relaxing spot, whose decor is rather well-done Euromodern. The lobby has running water, turquoise lights, lovely wood, weird-shaped sofas, and a civilized little bar that’s open late, where I got a bite and a beer. There’s WiFi in the bar, so I was online, and the only people there were me at a neatly-sidelit marble table, a geek on one of the big weird sofas also with laptop, and a couple sitting chatting softly to the bartender. There was some soft techno music pulse, just audible. If you’d put this on a movie screen in the 1950s it would have been a totally plausible Sci-Fi future. In late 2004, it’s just a glimpse of what more and more transient spaces are coming to look like.