ShadowRAM: May 24, 2004

"By and large, we're sick of paying $100K [per] year each just to get [antivirus/antispam] protection for something we'd rather be getting from Microsoft. We'd have no problem giving you guys $250K (an extra $50K) if it meant we got an integrated, supported, managed solution."

Speaking of Microsoft, does anyone find it odd that Bill Gates was telling the high-and-mighty CEOs assembled to hear his words about empowering employees the very week that Microsoft cut its peeps' health-care benefits? The company is cutting vacation grants to new hires and upping the amount they must pony up for prescription co-pays.

Last year was a pretty good one for Tom Siebel. The chairman and former CEO of the company that bears his name only earned a buck in salary, but the board's compensation committee awarded him a $1.25 million bonus, according to the company's proxy statement filed last week.

Company directors said Siebel met all the goals set out for him during 2003. But, according to the proxy, Siebel told the board he only wanted a $1 salary (nothing like raising expectations), and he also asked them to cancel all of his stock options granted from 1998 to 2001,options that could have been worth up to $56 million.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

It may have been the least Siebel could have done with shareholders watching. Even after a good year, Siebel's stock price last week was worth about 10 cents on the dollar of its pre-dot.com bust-out valuation.

Any notion that there is any shred of love left at Veritas for EMC was dispelled at the Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. Besides criticism of EMC's information life-cycle management strategy by several Veritas execs, including President, Chairman and CEO Gary Bloom, this reporter's EMC logo pen was taken from his hands by a Veritas exec. Said exec replaced the pen with an all-steel Veritas pen with a built-in laser pointer. Pity the batteries were dead.

But even with dead batteries, the pen may wind up having more value than Sun Microsystems' stock.

Chris Pyle, president and CEO of Champion Solutions Group, a $100 million systems integrator in Boca Raton, Fla., was in California last week and stopped at a local burger shack for lunch. Half-jokingly, he asked the cashier if he'd accept a share of Sun Microsystems stock as payment for his burger. "He said, 'No, I'd rather have the cash,' " Pyle said. "That's how bad Sun stock is doing right now. You can't even get a burger for it."