ShadowRAM

Siebel Systems employees apparently were offended by the flippant display of wealth. Just last month, Siebel said it would reduce head count by 15 percent to 6,000 from 7,164, after reporting disappointing earnings.

A spokeswoman for the company told the Chronicle Siebel paid for the event personally.

IBM's Louis Gerstner has picked and chosen his spots to make public pronouncements,a Comdex speech here, a Lou Dobbs interview there. Now he's trying another medium.

HarperBusiness plans to publish a Gerstner-penned book titled "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround" sometime in November. With a cover price of $27.95, we're betting the book will hit some cold spots for sales in places like Endicott, N.Y., where a few displaced IBMers might rather use the 320-page tome to fire up their woodstoves for the cold winter ahead.

During Sun Microsystems' midquarter conference call, CFO Steve McGowan dodged most questions about Sun's finances and channel conflict. Maybe there just isn't all that much to say when your stock is hovering in the $3 to $4 range.

Anyhoo, McGowan stuck to Sun's party line that there will be no more head-count reductions beyond existing ones. Still, some Sun employees are less than thrilled with other cost-cutting measures. To wit: Just like McNealy's trade show demos, Sun staffers aren't given regular, permanent offices. They get "virtual offices" and use Java cards that let them sign on to thin clients anywhere on campus. The thought has occurred to some that virtual offices may be a heckuva lot faster to clean out than real ones.

Microsoft resellers are gearing up for a series of Go To Market campaigns scheduled for the fall and early 2003 to spotlight opportunities made possible by the upcoming Windows .Net Server line.

At Microsoft's Reseller Executive Briefing last month in Seattle, the vendor told resellers that it is investing $45 million in marketing and on-air advertising for the Windows .Net launch in the first quarter of 2003 and in several Go To Market campaigns discussed at Fusion.

In the meantime, interest in the Microsoft antitrust case is heating up,even though rumors that a decision was coming down Aug. 30 turned out to be false. While a final decision on remedies has yet to be made by U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, Microsoft continues to behave as if its proposed consent decree with the Department of Justice is a done deal.

This week, the vendor plans to go ahead and release Windows XP Service Pack 1, which like the Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 released last month, incorporates changes to the user interface as required by its DOJ proposed consent decree.