ShadowRAM: April 16, 2007

Get A (Second) Life, Please
Second Life, for reasons beyond comprehension, is getting big in business. Or maybe it's just getting big PR in business.

At any rate, NetSuite partner Skyytek won the opportunity to implement NetSuite's hosted ERP suite for Linden Labs, home of the Second Life virtual environment where tech luminaries such as IBM's Sam Palmisano have held events. (Whether or not Sam actually manned his own avatar remains open to question.)

Anyway, Skyytek's top dog, Ray Tetlow, led the implementation, which included paperless accounts payable processing and back-end integration—all done inside 60 days, according to Netsuite.

Sixty days for ERP?!? Not too shabby, even if it is for a virtual world. Second Life continually touts its phenomenal, if virtual, growth. Most recently, it said its "residents" have converted "Linden Dollars" into about $5 million real U.S. greenbacks in January 2007. CFO John Zdanowski has said the company's world has grown sevenfold in 12 months.

"It's always thrilling for us to see the world's fastest-growing companies like Linden Labs use NetSuite to help make their vision a reality," said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, who has an avatar of his very own.

Web 2.0 Lunacy
The Web 2.0 boom is reprising its Web 1.0/dot-bom predecessor. H-1B visa grant quotas maxed in a day and desperate recruiters were quasi-spamming programmers.

David Heinemeier Hansson, partner in boutique app dev firm 37signals, recently got a recruiting pitch for a Ruby on Rails development position: "It looks like you have an interest in this new and exciting framework."

Hansson—who's fed up with the "spammy, mail-merged, sugar-laced drivel that passes for 'personalized' contact these days"—wrote back to say that yes, he does maintain an interest in the new and exciting Web development framework he invented. "The person was rather embarrassed," Hansson reports.

Seen And Heard
•Bob Stegner, last seen saying goodbye to the folks at Ingram Micro, resurfaced in Atlanta a few weeks ago to watch his beloved Ohio State Buckeyes lose to Florida—again. Stegner, former VP of worldwide channel development at the distributor, was also on hand for this year's Fiesta Bowl, in which the Gators trounced OSU.

"If I heard 'It's good to be a Gator' one more time, I was going to shoot myself," Stegner said after the 84-75 hoops loss April 2. He's now 0-2 for Ohio State since leaving Ingram Micro in January. No word on whether the Ohio State booster club is looking to ban Stegner from attending any future games.

•Sometimes a company's worst critics are not the ink-stained wretches but the workerbees within its own four walls.

Oracle insiders, for example, have been known to refer to the company's Collaboration Suite or Collab Suite, as "Collapse Suite." Hmmm. Reminds me of the good bad old days when insiders referred to the tardy Oracle Eight as "Oracle L'eight" (Oracle Late, get it?) And don't forget Intel's Itanium, aka "Itanic."

•What the...? It's always fun to read Wall Street analyst reports. Last week, Goldman Sachs changed its rating on Microsoft. Kinda. Microsoft was removed from Goldman's "Americas Conviction Buy List," but it retains a "Buy" rating. Huh?

Turns out, Goldman said Microsoft is at a critical juncture at the end of a strong development cycle. The software giant is also at the end of an era, facing threats from the sofware-as-a-service model and virtualization which could cause upgrade issues. (If people virtualize OSes, apps, maybe they won't buy as many?)

And, said Goldman, Vista may be the last big operating system developed by the company. Possible. But doubtful.

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