March 21, 2005
Vaporware And The Secret Sauce
Oregon Mutual Utility Fleshes Out Proposal For PGE
Earlier this month, we used the term vaporware to describe the proposal of yet another group aiming to make a bid for Portland General Electric in the wake of the Public Utility Commission's decision to rebuff the Texas Pacific Group buyout.
Just posted as a reader comment to that item is a message from one of those responsible for the Oregon Mutual Utility proposal.
In it, Jim Hansen pointed people to the group's website, which offers details of their proposal, including information on the proposed governance structure and financing plan (what OMU has referred to in the past as the "secret sauce" of their proposal).
We haven't yet had the chance to go through it ourselves, so we can't comment on the merits of the Oregon Mutual proposal, but we should point out that Hansen's attitude in his comment should get a few bonus points. Notice that rather than grumbling about our vaporware crack, he seizes upon it, extends the joke, and then (or so it seems to us anyway) turns it around into a veiled swipe at an unnamed other entity.
That says neither one thing nor the other about the proposal itself, but we appreciate it when people play along and not just cut and paste standard boilerplate.