ShadowRAM: December 9, 2002
- A CALL TO ARMS FOR AN INFLUENTIAL EX-IBMER
- I2 IS BURNING ITS WORKING CAPITAL AT A QUICK PACE
- INTUIT GIVES BOSTON-AREA GIRL SCOUTS A HAND
- In the interest of full disclosure, I caught about 10 seconds of the Masters golf tournament on TV this year as I was flipping channels to find a baseball game. Or was it two years ago? I'm not sure, since I'm not much of a golf fan.
- But the folks at The New York Times sure follow the sport. You could tell they do by the way they've covered the controversy over whether women should be admitted to the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters. That makes it all the more curious why the Times staffers haven't disclosed that John Akers, former IBM chairman and current director of The New York Times Co., is a member of the club.
- In fact, Akers himself could go a long way toward ending the controversy. Since he's a member of the club, he could nominate a woman for membership into the organization. That would make his buddies at the Times happy, right?
- Makes one wonder why the Times' editorial board has pushed for golf superstar Tiger Woods to boycott the Masters in an effort to force change at Augusta when, as of this writing, it hasn't said word one about what one of its own directors could do to promote change.
- Speaking of former IBM chairmen, Al Gore may have invented the Internet, but Lou Gerstner figured out how to make money on it. Or so both men might have us believe.
- In any event, I'm keeping track of sales for the books recently released by both men. Gore, with his wife Tipper, wrote "Joined at the Heart," which was ranked at a painful 2,420 on Amazon.com last week.
- Ex-IBM honcho Gerstner, with his manifesto, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" was at a much healthier No. 22 on the Amazon list.
- I2 continues to bleed money. According to its most recent 10Q filing with the SEC, the software company had $102 million in working capital through the end of September, a sharp drop from the $474 million it had at the start of the year.
- Despite having a working capital burn rate of more than $1.3 million a day, the company said that it expects to have enough cash to operate for at least the next 12 months.
- Unconfirmed rumor: Dell Computer is planning to ship a server based on AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron processor and will outsource the server from a company run in part by Phil Hester, former CTO of IBM's desktop business. But if I had a nickel for every Dell-AMD rumor, I could almost fully fund I2's burn rate.
- UBid.com, one of CMGI's investments, bought almost $40 million worth of computer products from Hewlett-Packard during its 2002 fiscal year for resale on its Web site, according to a recent SEC disclosure by struggling venture company CMGI. No information, though, on whether uBid made a profit on it.
- Intuit recently sent out some marketing material touting its QuickBase for Corporate Workgroups application. The material said QuickBase helped "18,000 Girl Scouts from the Patriots Trail Girl Scout Council" organize their annual sale of Girl Scout cookies.
- "We all love Thin Mints and Tagalongs, but we rarely think about the administrative nightmare that accompanies the annual Girl Scout cookie fund-raising drive," the company said.
- With the software, "these Boston-area Girl Scouts were able to accurately track thousands of orders, delivery details in realtime and streamline the ordering process."
- Nice story, but let's hope the Girls Scouts don't start giving out ERP merit badges.