Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Old 'Old Pro' Bites The Dust

Many university campuses are surrounded by well-aged watering holes. For Stanford students present and past, and those of us hangers on and locals, there are several of note. There's the grand-daddy, Rosatti's housed in an 1850's roadhouse (with graffiti back to the founding) located in tony Portola Valley. The Dutch Goose and the Beer Garden in Menlo Park, the latter in a building recycled from a WWI training camp. And in our end of Palo Alto, there's long been the Old Pro, in a tatty WWII-era Quonset hut on El Camino Real. None of these are exactly haute cuisine, but if you go expecting beer, burgers and peanuts and fun you'll be happy. (And the clientele is broad enough that you'd better not talk deals without checking out the nearby tables.)

The sword of Damocles the developer has been hanging over the Old Pro for several years, in the form of a New! Office! Building! Real Soon Now! sign in the gravel lot next door. The Old Pro owners opened up the New Old Pro in the upscale end of town about the same time. Now the sword has fallen. Today I walked past on a lunchtime ramble to Fry's and back, and the old dump is gone. The scrap iron of the old Q-hut has been hauled away, and there's an excavator perched like a vulture on the rubble that was the concrete slab. I'm sure they'll put up something pretty in its place, but (along with the loss of the Rickey's), it sure feels like we're carting a lot of Valley history off to the recycling yard of late.

The Last Portal

I popped over to my blog-daddy Jeff Jarvis' homestead looking for something else, and happened across his skewering of a Bear Stearns report on Yahoo, which suggested that YHOO needs a social network because they are the "next portal".

Baloney. As Jeff screams: "Portals are dead, damnit.". When Facebook turned into the latest darling, did it proclaim itself a portal? No, it declared that it would become a platform. That might not be tactically smart - it tends to paint a bullseye on your back - but it does proclaim the game that's actually in play. Jeff's take is that "...Yahoo should blow itself up and become the unportal, enabling anyone anywhere to take anything from Yahoo and put it on their own sites...", which parallels the last point of my own set of Yahoo forecasts. I also heartily recommend Jeff's more complete analysis of the Yahoo situation from a few weeks back.

When Valley geeks and New York media heads start singing from the same song book, maybe Yahoo ought to pay some attention. Their time to do so is limited. From an inside source, Yahoo's demographic is now skewing middle-aged and female. That tells you a lot regarding what their churn-off looks like, and perhaps some about what new users are still attracted to the content-driven portal model. They'd better serve that remaining user population well, and go figure a new model that can work in the more open and savvy present.

Voting Machines and Legitimacy

My good blog-buddy Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger, one of the leading lights at group blog Winds of Change, is a strong supporter of California Secretary of State (D) Debra Bowen. He has - I believe - had an behind-the-scenes advisory role in her office's security review of electronic voting machines, an effort I advocated long ago. Marc posted re the decertification of said machines, and called it 'the exact moment when a tide changed'. A discussion ensued - including a comment from the SoS herself - in the course of which I tossed in my own two cents worth, and then decided the matter was also on-point for this blog. So here's my original comment, with minimal editing. Please direct follow-up discussion to Winds: