ShadowRAM: December 2, 2002
- EDWARDSON UPDATES '80S PARTY SONG AS ODE TO CHANNEL
- IT SECURITY CAN'T BEAT A HOT CUP OF COFFEE
- NOKIA TRIES PUTTING A LID ON ITS COMDEX ADVERTISING
- So why was CDW Computer Centers' John Edwardson sporting a goatee at Comdex? It seems that Edwardson secretly longs to be a member of the MTV generation: He and other top CDW executives grew the facial hair to make a rock video for the song "What I Like About You," by The Romantics. The CDW execs rewrote the lyrics and renamed the song "That's Why We're Wild About You," turning the anthem into a homage to the company's vendor partners.
- And you thought vendors' channel policies were causing solution providers to lose their hair.
- Vendors, for their part, seem to have caught the video bug as well. Only Microsoft could recruit a lineup for a Comdex promotional video that runs the gamut from Tim Russert of "Meet The Press" and the Pets.com sock puppet to Sean "Puffy" Combs and Bill Clinton. One can only wonder how much the video cost. In a retrospective of the PC biz, Puffy reflected that he had been a huge DOS admirer. Said P. Diddy, Puff Daddy, or whatever handle he goes by this week: "I love DOS, although not as an operating system. It was a terrible operating system." That, however, didn't stop him from writing a rap song about it.
- In an extremely rare moment of self-deprecation, Microsoft's Bill Gates noted for the camera that he was really proud of knowing that everyone was going to the Internet,and especially proud that he knew so after they were already there.
- That comes from a man who has publicly claimed that Microsoft is responsible for XML, a statement that is outrageous on its face.
- Former Netscape whiz- kid Marc Andreessen also took his turn, modestly claiming credit for inventing the Internet. Hey, he at least has more of a right to say that than Gates does.
- Onetime Apple boss John Sculley, the foremost fan of the Newton, also took his swipes during Comdex. Feigning amazement that Microsoft's vaunted Tablet PC professes to use handwriting recognition, it was almost as if he were saying, "Why didn't I think of that?" Which, of course, he had,a decade ago.
- Don't slosh your coffee all over ShadowRam, but did you know that companies get more bang for their buck with coffee than IT security? That's what Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, said in a panel discussion on security at Comdex.
- "A hyped-up workforce gets you more profit than a secure network," he quipped, citing a statistic showing that businesses spend more money on coffee than security.
- All we can tell you is that hyped-up writers pen this column each week, with no thoughts about our personal security.
- For its part, Nokia tried a low-cost marketing gimmick at Comdex. The company passed baseball caps to most of the cabbies and instructed them to ask riders if they knew about the new Nokia phone. Their pay was a promise of $100 if the rider was a Nokia employee. One cabbie said his hat itched, another tossed his cap because it was a "woman's hat" that blew off too fast, and one gave it to his kid. None heard of any cabbies making any money.
- We wonder if Hewlett-Packard is really tallying up all of its costs for selling PCs direct when it compares itself to the channel. Some channel executives claim that the vendor isn't counting upgrades to its Web site or the cost of adding additional staff to its call center when it makes the comparison.