One thing that strikes me about all the talks and presentations at this conference is that they all assume ubiquitous net access. Kind of ironic then that the wireless access here has gone the way of oceanic flight 815. So, since this is the web and I like to link in my posts, having two out of three page requests fail makes for very little blogging from me at the moment. Even though I'm sitting right under what looks like a huge wifi access point bolted to the ceiling and have great signal strength, it's completely wasted when DHCP and DNS are out. You'd think at the Web 2.0 conference they'd actually have wireless that worked, wouldn't you?

By some ultimate form of serendipity we just had Debra Chrapaty from Microsoft with a 10 minute presentation which gave me the inspiration for this post's title. The presentation was a rather interesting tour of the new data centres that Microsoft are building. Truly awesome investments. It also illustrated the depths of competition that Google and MS find themselves in - literally competing for electricians to kit out their data centres.

It's interesting to remember back to the days of the last boom and the massive investments by Worldcom and others. After the crash all that overcapacity became dark fibre that is now fuelling the growth of the current generation of Internet heavyweights. Are they now making the same bets as before and building the data centre equivalent of dark fibre for some future post-crash generation? Let's hope not.