ShadowRAM: December 3, 2007
You're Getting Sleepy ...
•object
Speaking of the power of suggestion, Tech Data CEO Robert Dutkowsky took a pass on trying to offer any advice to Dell last week. When Dutkowsky conducted a conference call with financial analysts following Tech Data's quarterly earnings report, analyst William Fearnley of FTN Midwest Research asked Dutkowksy if he had "any commentary on Dell as they expand their channel footprint and get ready to launch their formal channel plan."
Dutkowsky, who must be well aware of Dell's $4-billion-a-year annual revenue stream through North American solution providers, kept his cool.
"I'm sure Dell is a well-run company and Dell will make good decisions that affect Dell's business," Dutkowsky said.
Um huh?
Beta Version? No Thanks
• So Firefox 3 Beta 1 hit the market last month, and the first thing many beta-testers discovered was that when they tried to use Yahoo mail or other services with the Mozilla browser, the whole works just crashed. Seems Yahoo engineers are taking the rap for this one, and say the problem was code or "trunk" issues on their end and that it'll all be worked out. (Thanks for pointing out who's to blame, Firefox fanboys!) Mozilla engineers, though, fessed up to a glitch in Firefox 3 Beta 1 that caused its memory to spike beyond all imagination and crash many a PC. They, too, say that's being fixed. Which reminds us all why we never use beta versions of anything.
SEEN AND HEARD
• In the book "Conspiracy Of Fools," Kurt Eichenwald's Enron tome, there's a scene in which Enron's Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay lobby to cut a deal with Sun in which Sun would help Enron build out its emerging broadband business in exchange for Enron buying a lot of Sun servers. Sun's then-CEO Scott McNealy and senior exec Jonathan Schwartz showed enthusiasm while Ed Zander, then Sun's president, voiced skepticism. McNealy and Schwartz chose not to listen, the book says, and a deal was cut that eventually went down in flames with Enron. And, as we all know, Zander left Sun and re-emerged as CEO of Motorola. As of last week, he has stepped aside from that post under mounting pressure in the cell phone biz.
• AMD continues to move deliberately (see "slow") on its Barcelona processors into the PC industry pipeline. As of last week, Dell appeared to be taking some orders for servers based on the quad-core Opteron, but HP was a little more vague. Here's a snippet of an online chat with a sales rep on HP.com:
Guest: Hi, Noah. Does HP offer servers with AMD's new quad-core Opteron processors?
Noah: Hi there! HP is working on it. We can expect the launch of the product soon.
"Soon" is a relative term.
It took years for AMD to announce it had developed a quad-core server processor. The chip maker said it would start volume shipments of the chip in the middle of the quarter—which passed two weeks ago.