ShadowRAM: December 23/30, 2002

• CMGI'S BILLION-DOLLAR BABIES ARE NOW BIG LOSSES
• HP PUTS SPIN CONTROL ON IBM SERVER ANNOUNCEMENTS
• LOOKS LIKE MICROSOFT IS FOOTING THE DINNER BILL FOR CDW
• n eight-month investigation into stock-trading activity by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and other company executives by independent members of Oracle's board has ended with the members reporting no wrongdoing was committed.
• However, in legal papers filed in Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington, Oracle directors Joseph Grundfest and Hector Garcia-Molina acknowledge new allegations made by shareholders as recently as last month that Oracle cooked its books.
• "That complaint alleges that in [the second quarter of [fiscal 2001, Oracle committed accounting fraud by applying cash from previous customer credits and overpayments to phony invoices to create fictitious revenue," the directors wrote. Another allegation charges that Oracle "committed accounting fraud by inappropriately transferring cash from its unapplied cash account to its bad debt reserve to increase earnings in [the third quarter of fiscal 2001."
• However, Grundfest and Garcia-Molina said they concluded, after reviewing 250,000 documents and conducting more than 70 interviews of Oracle officers, employees and customers, that there was no wrongdoing either in stock trades or accounting.

• Judges in the federal suit in Northern California, a suit in Delaware Chancery Court and a suit in San Mateo County Superior Court in California are all reserving decisions about whether to permit the lawsuits against Oracle to proceed.
• Remember when CMGI Chairman David Wetherell was saying,and the press was reporting,that he figured his technology venture company could sell off a number of businesses and wind up with $2 billion to $3 billion in cash? That was two-and-a-half years ago.
• Times change. CMGI filed its quarterly report with the SEC last week, reporting it maintained less than $200 million in cash and the two most recent properties it sold didn't help the bottom line. CMGI sold its holdings in Equilibrium Technologies for a loss of $3.5 million. Last month, it sold its stake of Signatures SNI for a loss of $14.1 million.
• The Hewlett-Packard flak brigade's War Room is buzzing these days, and it's clearly focused on rival IBM.
• The past two IBM server announcements were barely released when HP churned out its spin. First, HP blasted IBM's Linux-only pSeries server, saying price advantages were overstated and it doesn't offer Windows compatibility like HP's Itanium 2-based systems do.
• Last week IBM launched its new Intel-based, 16-way servers, and HP was on its heels again, accusing its rival of being "so aggressive" in its announcements because "HP is the worldwide market leader in servers and dominates the industry-standard IA32 market with 32.2 percent of market shipments."
• HP didn't clarify its most recent channel vs. direct numbers on that spin piece, however.
• It looks as though Steve Ballmer will be taking CDW Computer Center's volume software licensing team out to dinner real soon. CDW CEO John Edwardson currently has a bet with Ballmer that the Vernon Hills, Ill.-based company would grow its 2002 Microsoft revenue more than a predetermined amount faster than Microsoft grew its own business.
• For the record, CDW's Microsoft revenue has grown 34 percent so far this year, while Microsoft has grown so far about 16 percent. Ballmer will be taking seven CDW people to dinner. "I think Microsoft has enough in its checking account to cover dinner for seven of us," Edwardson said.