ShadowRAM: March 12, 2007

The latest example falls into "The Ouch Department." Last week, Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co., gave his two cents on Michael Dell's latest foray into managing his eponymous company. (Keep in mind that Wolf owns shares in Dell).

Wolf said: "Michael Dell cautioned that growth and margins could continue under pressure for several quarters. The open question is whether the prodigal son has the intelligence and stamina to ever return his company to its former glory. That's the reason we're downgrading the stock from buy to hold."

It's not like we're jumping on the bandwagon by taking shots at Dell. For 20 years, we were the bandwagon. But now it feels like the point in the cartoon where Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd, after ripping down hunting signs from a tree and alternating between yells of "duck season!" and "rabbit season!" get to a poster of Michael Dell's face.

EL JOBSO'S RAZZLE DAZZLE NEVER FAILS
• Scott Knaster, a Mac team technical writer for Google, took a few of his colleagues over to Apple's cafeteria in Cupertino for lunch recently and then, blogging about it, sounded more like groupie than a techie:

"As we were enjoying our lunch and chatting with Apple friends, we noticed a slight disturbance in the room, as if all the air had rushed to a single place, over by the salad bar. As you have probably guessed, it was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, grabbing some lunch with Jonathan Ive, Apple's industrial design guru. As the two moved across the room, there was no great commotion—after all, this probably happens just about every day at Apple—but our Google group and many other folks stopped eating long enough to follow the two rock stars around the room for awhile."

We've seen CEOs eat lunch. We've seen rock stars eat lunch. We've even seen Intel's Craig Barrett hand Aerosmith's Steven Tyler a stick of gum. But we draw the line at stalking.

SEEN AND HEARD
• 1NService Chairman John Breakey (aka CEO of member company Unis Lumin and sister company Genuit in Toronto) got almost teary-eyed at the recent Interchange conference, when he got to talking about how big the group has grown. But he brightened up when discussing the deal he inked with the NHL for a portal to track player injuries. What hockey game would be complete without blood on the ice? Every, and we mean every, little injury now must be documented and entered, and the records travel with the player (subject to privacy restraints) from team to team as trades are made. Does that mean you can get me tixs to the Canadiens, John?

Speaking of 1NService, some find it ironic that now-vice-chairman Tim Hebert, now CEO of Atrion Networking, actually thought the whole alliance thing was a silly idea when first approached about it. Glad you reconsidered, Tim.

• This one takes takes the concept of red-eye travel to new highs, er, lows. The recent Business Objects partner confab could have been derailed by the snow storms that methodically shuttered airports across the country, but this tenacious group prevailed. After being stranded in Washington, VP Todd Rowe and a bunch of other employees hopped an Amtrak train (sans sleeping cars) for the overnight schlep to lovely Charleston.