ShadowRAM: June 5, 2006

Booch recently blogged about the discovery a few weeks ago that, after being diagnosed more than a year ago with an aneurysm of the ascending aorta, he needed major surgery to get the condition fixed. So he checked into the Mayo Clinic and had the surgery, blogging about it practically all the wayeven from the intensive care unit. "I am inside the ICU at Mayo Clinic, just a few hours after my open-heart surgery. Steve, my ICU registered nurse, is my eyes and fingers typing this blog. As you can tell by the very fact that I am blogging, I am not dead yet."

Microsoft flaks made sure to muzzle CEO Steve Ballmer before turning him loose last week for a rare speech before financial analysts. Attendees had to submit questions in writing, sparing Ballmer the risk of launching a thousand headlines with an imprecisely worded response to interrogation on touchy subjects like Vista's ship date.

Ballmer made it clear from the get-go that the financial crowd would get little of his signature enthusiasm: "Some of you may have seen [it]. There's a video that floats around on the Internet in which I run around and jump and scream and yell about developers and some such or 'I love Microsoft,' " Ballmer said at the start of his presentation. "I have a sore foot today. I'm not only not going to run around and jump, I won't even give you a round of 'Investors, investors, investors!' "

John Chambers guided Cisco through the dot-com explosion, but quite frankly, he's no Jack Bauer. It took Chambers at least two years to extricate his company from the market downturn. On the hit TV program "24," Bauer gets his job done in a day.

But Cisco and Fox TV find synergy nonetheless.

In the most recent season of the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle, Cisco managed to finagle product placements for its Unified Personal Communicator. The vendor even put up a Web page (cisco.com/24) with a clip where you can "see how the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator solution will help the '24' team save the day!"

Only Microsoft could come out with a product, Windows Live OneCare, whose sole mission is to help fix problems with some of its other products (IE, Windows). It's certainly been quick with marketing placements. On Sunday, Microsoft's retail partner Best Buy displayed the OneCare logo on Jeff Green's No. 66 stock car in the Neighborhood Excellence 400 event in Dover, Del.

Memo to Microsoft: It might be better to seek sponsorships at events where the potential for crashes is less imminent.