The Winchester Horror

I just finished reading The Winchester Horror, by William F. Nolan, the writer who's probably most famous for Logan's Run. The Winchester Horror is a novella that tells the story of a ghost that haunts the Winchester mansion in San Jose, California. If you don't have much time to read, novellas are great. They let you trick yourself into thinking that you're reading more than you really are because they're much shorter than most other books. Between January 1, 2009 and March 1, 2009, I actually managed to read 18 books. This may sound impressive, but when you consider the fact that that time includes part of my Christmas vacation and that most of the 18 books are actually novellas, it actually turns out to be much less impressive.

The Winchester mansion was built by Sara Winchester from 1884 to 1922 at a cost of roughly $5.5 million. Apparently, she was concerned that the ghosts of people killed by Winchester firearms would kill her if she stopped construction of the unusual building. The result of this 38-year project is a 160-room house that's truly bizarre. It has only 17 chimneys for its 47 fireplaces. It has stairs that lead to the ceiling. It has cupboards that open onto brick walls. It even has a door on one of the upper floors that opens onto a drop straight to the ground below. Much of it doesn't make any sense at all. It seems to have built without much planning, and it was fairly expensive. In other words, it's just like today's computer networks.

Much like the Winchester mansion grew in an unplanned way into what's there today, today's networks have also evolved in a similar way. And just like it's hard to make sense of some parts of the Winchester mansion, it's also hard to understand exactly how some networks could have ever got to the point where they are now. Nobody lives in the Winchester mansion today – it's now a tourist attraction. After Sara Winchester's death, it probably proved to be too annoying to actually live in. Unfortunately, it's not practical to just walk away from the networks that have grown over time into the unwieldy beasts that they are today. And although they may seem to be just as confusing as the Winchester mansion, it's unlikely that we'll be able to turn them into attractions that we can charge admission to, so we're stuck using them.

Because they've grown over time instead of being carefully planned, it's always very difficult to integrate two or more networks. Businesses often try to do this when they acquire other companies or try to work more closely with partners, and it's almost always much harder than you think it's going to be. You may have your version of the Winchester mansion, but the people that you want to integrate with have their own version, and it hasn't evolved in the same way that yours did. Your network may assume that all of your data is handled by the equivalent of the stairs that lead to the ceiling, and the other network may assume that all of its data gets handled by the equivalent of the cupboard that opens onto a brick wall. Getting these two networks to work together can be hard. Sometimes it's even impossible.

It's well known that most acquisitions don't out work very well. Incompatible corporate cultures are one big cause of this, but I have to wonder how many of these failures can be traced to the difficulties in getting different networks to work together.