Your typical clock synchronization protocol like NTP provides a timestamp, but it can't guarantee that event A truly happened before event B if they occurred on different machines. Spanner's TrueTime solves this by providing time as an interval, not a point, ensuring global serializability even across continents. When your distributed system relies on timestamps from different servers, you're building on shaky ground. Imagine a global e-commerce platform where a user tries to buy the last item i