Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashlee Vance visits Alviso, California, a forgotten town at the edges of Palo Alto and Mountainview that's a destination for Silicon Valley engineers looking for good Mexican food.--
Cassidy: Alviso isn't Silicon Valley's ghost town, but it is something else - SiliconValley.com: " . . . . Alviso is different. Over the years, I've written about squatters living on barely floating boats in the Alviso Slough. I've written about sheep grazing along the chaotic traffic of Highway 237. I've written about Vahl's, a restaurant frozen in time somewhere around 1952 (though it does now feature karaoke and accepts credit cards). And there is something powerful about being confronted by the remnants of the past, like the decaying cannery featured in the Bloomberg video, or the leaning wooden sheds and buildings that were a vibrant part of the valley's agricultural past and Alviso's history as a port. Silicon Valley is a place obsessed by what's ahead. What's past is past. But it is also a place susceptible to complacency. We are trendsetters and worldbeaters and sometimes it's hard for some to see a scenario in which they are no longer on top. Maybe, then, working among the ruins of the agricultural past in Alviso provides an advantage to the engineers who work every day at TiVo, IBM, Polycom, Flextronics and the other tech companies big and small that are moving in on what some might call Silicon Valley's ghost town."
