ShadowRAM: July 9, 2007

DELL, A LAWYER AND TROUBLE AT NASDAQ
boot compliance file Audit

Steven Bochner is co-chair of the Nasdaq Listing and Hearing Review Council, and he's also lawyer at the Silicon Valley firm of Wilson Sonsini GoodrichRosati. Wilson Sonsini lists Dell publicly as one of its prominent clients. So, essentially, Dell was throwing itself on the mercy of a panel that lists a lawyer for one of its own law firms as co-chair.

Dell declined to comment. Bochner referred questions to Nasdaq, which declined to comment beyond having a spokesman point to Nasdaq guidelines that offer boilerplate conflict of interest rules.

For what it's worth, if the full Nasdaq board rejects Dell's latest appeal for more time, Dell can still appeal to the SEC under the stock exchange's rules. So this thing could drag on for many, many more months.

SEEN AND HEARD
• Supermicro Computer said in a filing with the SEC that it's agreed to plunk down $11.3 million for a 90,000-square-foot facility at 880 Fox Lane in San Jose. The deal, with CN Fox, is expected to close by Oct. 15, the motherboard maker said. Supermicro is still angling toward an IPO.

• Microsoft's acronym addiction extends to the realm of lunch catering. At a recent lunch meeting at headquarters in Redmond, two of our reporters glimpsed a flier alongside the lunch spread that warned of "PHFs," or potentially hazardous food items—a label that applies to cold salads, sliced fruits, and dips and salsas. Stop it. Just stop it.

NOT DRINKING THE KOOL-AID?
• It's often an ominous sign when top executives conspicuously stop using their own employers' products. (But not unexpected when you see them dropping Microsoft-based smart phones in favor of iPhones, but that's another story.)

Microsoft developer James Newkirk, product manager for the company's CodePlex shared-source portal, recently migrated his blog from MSDN to Typepad, a rival blogging service run by indie developer Six Apart. A cryptic post in which Newkirk said he decided to move away from MSDN "for a number of reasons" set tongues wagging.

In a follow-up e-mail, Newkirk said that his reasons were innocent. "The main reason for the switch is that I needed a facility for having HTML pages in addition to blog posts. This is not possible on http://blogs.msdn.com," he said.

Sounds like it's time for Microsoft to do some upgrading on MSDN Blogs. Or buy Six Apart.