ShadowRAM: April 4, 2005

Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz, the highest-ranking high-tech executive with a ponytail, wrote on his blog about taking his two-year-old son to get a haircut—a trip that also turned out to have less-than-optimum results for Schwartz.

"The only thing that seemed to calm him down was my sitting in the haircutter's chair with him on my lap. Midway through his haircut, the pleasant-but-frenzied woman cutting his hair asked if I'd like mine cut. Foolishly thinking 'How convenient!' I consented. I now face a minimum of 60 awkward hair days "

But don't expect Schwartz to don any red hats to cover up the salon gaffe.

Sources say Jim Finn, longtime PR aide de camp to Oracle and Larry Ellison, is about to resurface at—drumroll, please—IBM! For those of us who remember Larry's long rants about IBM and its database business, this should prove an interesting match.

Interestingly, virtually every business intelligence/ analytics vendor contacted by CRN last week about Microsoft's planned realtime reporting server said they welcome Microsoft's looming entry into the market with its planned Office realtime reporting server.

"This validates our strategy," they all crowed. Or words to that effect.

Funny, that's what Lotus said during its 1-2-3 spreadsheet heyday, and what WordPerfect proclaimed when it was the word-processing king. Same with Borland and Netscape, etc. Word to the wise: No one's buying it, guys, come up with a different story.

We hear Cisco tried to nab consummate activist/ rock god Bono as a guest speaker for this week's edgy music-themed Partner Summit in Vancouver. But, alas, U2's tour schedule got in the way.

But the conference producers aren't exactly singing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Instead of Bono, record producer Jimmy Iovine is slated to appear, along with Sir George Martin of Beatles fame. Those in the know said the tone of the conference will be a tad less formal than usual—even buttoned-up John Chambers is expected to forgo his trademark blue suit in favor of more casual black-on-black attire.

Via blogger Rik Lambers at Constitutionalcode.blogspot.com, we found a bizarre SKU of a ViewSonic "computer" for sale on Amazon.com boasting the following specs: a 10GHz Athlon processor, 2,000 Mbytes of DIMM RAM, the DOS operating system, a 30,000-Gbyte IDE hard drive—all weighing a mere fourteen-hundredths of a pound. Imagine our horror when we realized this was, shocking to say, really an error.

You really have to hand it to Amazon.com. That is one product you'd never find in the channel.