New Community Market Near Oracle?

Hello my Oracle compatriots. This post is not about our technology but about our surroundings here at headquarters. There is a new kind of community market that’s helping revitalize the city of Napa, and there’s a move afoot to get a similar market in our neighboring town of San Carlos. There is an abandoned grocery store on the main strip in San Carlos that is begging for something like the Oxbow Market. Check out this story in the San Jose Mercury for a good summation of the Oxbow Market experience. There’s also this impromptu interview I shot with one of the Oxbow tenants while I was in Napa.

One of the interesting things about Oxbow Market is that alongside the charcuterie and the cheese shop and the bakery are built-in stalls so farmers can bring in their best seasonal produce. The whole presentation creates a great setting for the small restaurants.

For all of you who live in the area and would like to see something this progressive and enjoyable take over this abandoned market, there’s one simple thing you can do: visit this post on a popular San Carlos real estate blog and put in a comment supporting the market.

Bike to Work Day!

One thing I like about Silicon Valley communities is their progressive spirit. This morning at the San Carlos train station I ran into the “Bike to Work Energizer Station” sponsored by the Peninsula Traffic Congestion Relief Alliance, who can be found at www.511.org. Thank you, ladies!

Web 2.0. It’s Good Old Fashioned Business

A business-savvy friend asked me to explain Web 2.0. For background, this friend has built several businesses, taken disruptive new technologies to market, and has now established a thriving consultancy in Washington DC. He knows more about the psychology and the nuts and bolts of a business transaction than 99.9 percent of the people at the Web 2.0 conference last week. But he knew he needed to begin to understand how to use Web 2.0 for the future of his business. I sent him the usual reading and a link to O’rielly’s “What is Web 2.0” page. But more importantly, I emailed him this short “Old vs New” list I leaned from Greg Syverson over at Grunt Media:

Old: Brand protection. New: Brand adoption.
Old: Credibility. New: Street cred.
Old: Corporate filter. New: Personal voice.
Old: Serious and square. New: Casual and real.
Old: Everything is just great. New: Everything is cool.

My friend quickly realized that Web 2.0 didn’t negate any of his accumulated knowledge, it simply embraced and extended the way he built his businesses in the first place, with honesty and personal relationships.

Guessing at the Future

One niggling task of a Senior Editor at Oracle is to occasionally update the Oracle Timeline with product news and other notable items. The idea is that the choices I make will serve as a public record for the future.

Those choices were much easier when I was writing about 1983 when we could look back and see that the decision to make Oracle database widely compatible and portable would turn out to be monumental.

But what decisions being made today will echo through the ages? I think the fact that Database 11g adoption is strong will be important. And there might be sleepers like the new Enterprise Manager option for monitoring the user experience, or the new testing suite based on the recently announced, yet already legendary Real Application Testing.

Will Oracle middleware for applications be seen as a step towards something huge? I think it will. But will the recently announced extension of support for legacy versions of E-business Suite, which is extremely important to current customers, be remembered as “news” in five years time? Your guess is as good as mine.