ShadowRAM: November 13, 2006

Simultaneously, Cingular's customer service representatives were doing all they could to help explain to customers what one Cingular technical support person described as the fallout from a six-million-unit lot of bad SIM cards, which made their way into the wild. Cingular tech support told Mike Sidnam, IT administrator at Kaufman, Rossin and Co., a CPA firm in Miami, that the bad cardswhich cripple data functions such as wireless e-mailwere a dirty delivery from a manufacturer who "reversed the ROM and RAM wires."

A representative at a Miami Cingular store said she knew there was a SIM card problem, so she was replacing the defective cards for free for any customer who brought one in. Speaking on a Cingular-powered Motorola Smartphone with a new SIM card that replaced the defective (Pssst, lot 63698G 3003) SIM card, one customer said the problem raised the bar on how bad Cingular service could get and was about to gleefully tell us how little time he had left on his cellular contract when the call was suddenly dropped.

Vista kingpin Jim Allchin sounded as giddy as a school kid on the RTM call last Tuesday. I lost count of how many times he said it was a "good day." You gotta feel for that guywhat a long, strange road that has been. He reaffirmed previously announced plans to leave the company after general availability of the new Windows client in late January.

Still, even some Microsoft partisans admit that the coverage of the RTM of a years-late product that was missing many of its promised features was a bit over the top. Let's move on, people. The bloom is off that roseand off Longhorn, too, for that matter.

Vista may be nearly ready, but worries about application compatibility remain.

Scott Stanfield, CEO of solution provider Vertigo Software in Point Richmond, Calif., is peeved about one killer app that won't run well on Vista RC 2: World of Warcraft. Already a Vista devotee at work, Stanfield is waiting to upgrade his home PC until the problems are resolved. "I hope the video driver manfacturers get their acts together," he griped.

Note to Microsoft: ShadowRam recommends getting Nvidia et al on this problemstatif you don't want six million WoW gamers storming the Redmond gates with Arcanite Reapers.

Redmond sources still insist there is a super-duper-secret skunkworks developing a Linux version of Office. These rumors crop up repeatedly, but given the new lovefest between Novell and Microsoft, they're getting new legs.