Had there been a NXTcomm in, say, 380 B.C.E., one of the panelists in the last session of the last day, third in line to give his presentation to a sparse crowd of hung-over Westerners and eager, bright-eyed Easterners, would likely have been a gadfly named Plato. And when it was his turn to speak, he would have risen from his klismos, forsaken his notes and PowerPoint presentation and forcefully extolled the virtues of form.

Form was his thing. Because everything in the material world, according to Plato, was merely a representation of reality that took on the form of its counterpoint in the real world, form always trumped function.

A chair, or klismos, didn't have to be any good. It didn't have to be comfortable. It just had to have enough form and definition to be recognized as a chair. I'm not sure what Plato would have to say if he were asked to speak at NXTcomm in Chicago this month--provided he could pull off the trick of that famous philosopher that followed him by 300 years and rise from the dead--but I'll bet he would just choose to sit down and shut up.

Form, now known as the form factor, is not quite as important these days. That's primarily because it keeps changing. The elements in a next-generation network bear no resemblance to the network that preceded it, yet the function of the network is the same: connect people and computers that want to communicate.

So a Platonic theory of form becomes as outdated as the flowing robes Plato wore 2300 years ago--well, outdated in most parts of the world. That's why drawings of networks--from either CAD systems or dinner napkins--show boxes and boxes of what we call "functional elements." Function trumps form in the telecom network. Form just saves money--when it's the right one.