ShadowRAM: February 20, 2006
The big RSA confab was a regular laugh riot. In his Valentine&'s Day keynote, Bill Gates quipped that he was glad to be there, noting that he&'d turned down an opportunity to shoot quail with Dick Cheney, and it was nice to be in San Jose instead, safe and secure. Bada boom.
One booth attendant for Extreme Networks sheepishly admitted that the company&'s new T-shirt isn&'t quite politically correct. “You can&'t really wear it,” he told a female attendee. The slogan? “I&'m a very secure guy. (Thanks, Extreme!)” He offered: “Some women are giving them to their boyfriends.”
Borland has a new CEO and may soon have no IDE, but its PR effort continues.
In a snail-mailed promo, the vendor touted its 23 years in the software biz. Hardly anyone needs reminding that today&'s Borland is not much like the Borland of yore, with its epic Philippe Kahn vs. Microsoft vs. Lotus vs. the world battles.
Now Borland is headed by boy wonder Tod Nielsen, ex of Oracle, BEA, Crossgain and Microsoft.
Some vets remember Tod courting die-hard Borland dBase and Paradox developers for the then-upstart Microsoft database business. It&'s weird to think of Borland divesting its IDE business, but I guess that&'s what Eclipse does to a company.
The aforementioned mailing pairs 1986 and 2006 cultural and tech trends from Borland&'s history. In 1986, the TV hit was “Dynasty.” Today it&'s “Desperate Housewives.” Favorite TLAs (three-letter acronyms) for 1986: IDE. For 2006: SDO. (Before you go look it up, SDO is Borland&'s Software Delivery Optimization game plan.) For entertainment, Pong was big in 1986, Kong is big now. The note helpfully explains that in the past 23 years, Borland has gone through more changes than Madonna has hairstyles.
There were a lot of raised eyebrows last week when news surfaced that the feds suspect former CA bigwig Sanjay Kumar of destroying evidence. According to published reports, the government has evidence that Kumar&'s colleague, former top sales guy Stephen Richards, built a directory on his hard drive dubbed “incinerate” after receiving an SEC subpoena, and then used to do just that. Both men have been charged with obstructing justice in an investigation of possible fraud at the company.