Scott Davis (Musings on Java and Open Source) What's so funny about Java, OS X, Peace, Love, and Understanding?

So last week I flew out to Salt Lake City to give my Real World Web Services talk at the Utah JUG. (Great crowd, as always. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in June.)

My flight landed a couple of hours before the meeting. Jay Zimmerman (founder of NFJS) picked me up at the airport. I suggested that we find the nearest Starbucks and shoot the breeze until the meeting started.

(SLC natives are already laughing.)

We drove around for an hour and a half looking for a Starbucks, a Seattle's Best, a local joint, anything... We finally admitted defeat and drove to the UJUG meeting. (Mind you, by that time we were laughing hysterically at our folly.) Later that night, Ben Galbraith said, "Yeah, umm, I think there is one Starbucks in town. It's downtown somewhere."

I'm not casting aspersions on anyone's religious beliefs here, but caffeine has very little to do with Starbucks. They sell decaf, for goodness sake. (Ben was sipping a virgin margarita as he made a mental sweep of SLC for coffee shops.)

No, the real appeal of Starbucks is everything but the caffeine. It's a cool place to hang out. They have WiFi. They are laptop-friendly. They generally have great music playing in the background. (The only CDs I buy these days are from a coffee house -- Best Buy, take note.) I do a ton of book writing there. And the best thing of all? As I travel from city to city on business, Starbucks and Kinkos are my stalwart companions. (Panera Breads are good in a pinch as well -- good eats, free WiFi.) They are, quite literally, my home away from home. Hotel and airport internet connections are tough to find and rarely reliable. Starbucks is like a warm blanket and fuzzy slippers -- with bandwidth.

People who complain about $5 cups of coffee are missing the point. $5 is infinitely cheap for two hours of my time in a clean, hip environment. Near my office in Broomfield, there is a Subway next door to the Starbucks. Sometimes I'll take a working lunch at Subway -- same price, same WiFi, but not at all the same experience. Sitting on a yellow plastic bench, listening to easy listening or Lite Hits of the 80s, I usually end up trying to stare through the wall, imagining what all the cool kids are doing on the other side.

Of course, someone who doesn't mind paying $5 for a cup of coffee isn't going to sweat paying $3k for a MacBook Pro either, are they? In both cases, it's the experience. Not the status. Not the snobbery. The quality of the experience makes the price seem like a bargain. If I just wanted coffee, I'd go to Denny's. If I just wanted a laptop, I'd buy a $400 Dell.

Sigh... if being a target demographic is wrong, then I don't want to be right.