ShadowRAM: March 8, 2004

We don't know about you, but we found IBM's future technology demo at PartnerWorld a bit ironic. After Palmisano told CRN that IBM would avoid the consumer market because the return on investment wasn't very attractive, IBM showed a live demo of a digital kitchen. There were digital refrigerators talking to digital ovens and a solution that allows you to prepare dinner by sending commands to kitchen devices via your cell phone. For our part, we'd just as soon use our cell phone to order Chinese take out.

The word from Microsoft's relatively new Exchange Server pooh-bah is that the team's absolute, tip-top priority is to make the mail server product the very best back end to the gazillions of Outlook clients out there. That's what Microsoft's Dave Thompson told his folks recently, though no one's quite sure yet what that means. Some speculate that Microsoft will no longer devote so much time and money to building connectors for Lotus Domino and other mail servers, except that those connectors come from another group at the company where presumably they don't have to listen so carefully to Mr. Thompson. Conspiracy theorists think it means that Microsoft

may mess with MAPI, the client-to-server protocol. Now that would be a story. But since Microsoft owns MAPI, the company can have its way with it.

Things have been mighty quiet at Groove Networks of late, except for the odd tidbit about resident genius Ray Ozzie being named to a national academy of eggheads. But that silence isn't likely to last much longer. Groove is gearing up to announce the beta of version 3 of its collaboration software. The final product,if there is such a thing in software anymore,is due to ship this summer.

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