ShadowRAM: October 29, 2007

The Web 2.0 Battlefront
• EBay CEO Meg Whitman kept her keynote appointment at the Web 2.0 Summit despite the company's rocky earnings call the night before, when it suffered its first loss since the late '90s. Questioned by show host Tim O'Reilly about missteps like eBay's pricey and troubled Skype buy, Whitman was confident and defiant: "In this business, the price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake," she responded.

Whitman also threw a few sharp elbows back, questioning O'Reilly about his conference's overwhelmingly male speaker and audience lineup. "At a normal conference, it'd be 50/50. Look around. Here, it's 90/10," she pointed out while O'Reilly squirmed.

The show's riposte high point came in former Industry Standard publisher John Battelle's interview with Steve Ballmer. Microsoft's CEO opened the interview by saying it's impossible for him to pick a favorite Microsoft product: they're all like his children.

"How about search?" Battelle later asked. "Is it one of those kids you might privately smack on the side of the head and say, 'Do a better job, Jimmy?'"

The query sent Ballmer on an extended, hyperanimated riff about how Microsoft search is like a 3-year-old sent out to play basketball against teenagers, to whom Ballmer would say: "You're growing up quick, you're getting better every day, you've got all the potential in the world ... you're going to dunk on these guys some day!" As the voluble executive wound down, he quipped, "Now what were we talking about again?"

Battelle's dry reply: "I think we were talking about the Zune."

What's Larry Up To?
• Larry Ellison is making us edgy.

The billionaire boss of Oracle has filed papers with the SEC saying he's sold off about 13 million shares of company stock so far in the month of October, at prices ranging between $21 and $23 per share. To him, that may be pocket change, but a million shares here, a million shares there, and pretty soon you're talking about real paper. Granted, the $240 million or so we're going on about is roughly equal to the crumbs left over from Oracle's long-shot BEA takeover attempt

Seen And Heard
• The Emmy Award for best line in a TV show, ever, has to go to the season finale of AMC's "Mad Men." In that episode, the shadowy ad genius Don Draper works to land an account with Kodak to develop advertising for its slide projector, which Kodak engineers keep referring to as "the wheel." (Those Kodak guys! Great with the technology, lousy with the marketing.) In making his pitch, the fictional Draper demonstrates the projector using slides of his own intimate family moments and proclaims, "This isn't a wheel. It's a carousel." Hence, the fictional birth of the real product, The Carousel.

Out of curiosity, we did some checking around. It seems there is a Don Draper in real life who isn't an ad executive from Madison Avenue, but rather an IT consultant from Atlanta.