ShadowRAM: February 17, 2003

At the HP conference last week, HP executives jumped all over the controversy, saying HP plans to bust Dell in the upcoming printer battle. One HP exec said Curtis should consider calling "1-800-MUNCHIES."

Another HP executive also took a swipe at Sun Microsystems, promising he would not rest until he put the final nail in CEO Scott McNealy's coffin.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has a rough row to hoe with its realtime communications/collaboration strategy, sources said. Partners briefed on "iWave" plans for SharePoint, Office 11/2003 and XDocs (InfoPath) two weeks ago gave the strategy a big raspberry. Microsoft's ever-shifting message now must include the PlaceWare acquisition. Apparently, the SharePoint guru who presided over the briefing was lucky to leave the room alive.

To add insult to injury, sources said Microsoft partisans who long ago defected to Exchange from Lotus Domino are now reconsidering. Not only that, if Lotus prices its NextGen e-mail correctly, it can beat Microsoft at the low end by grabbing users who don't have e-mail, while still satisfying those at the high end with the true collaboration that Domino offers but Exchange cannot provide, sources said.

One eye-catching item as the federal budget snakes its way through Congress is a proposal to "exclude from income the value of employer-provided computers, software and peripherals." Current law calls for company-owned computers given to employees for telecommuting to be parsed,for tax purposes,between the value of the product used for company business and the value used for personal business. The new proposal would let employees to exclude these systems from income, "to simplify record-keeping, improve compliance and encourage telecommuting."

A posting on internalmemos.com purportedly comes from a Sun internal communication that shows engineers raising concerns about using Java on Solaris. According to the memo, "While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++, its implementation on Solaris presents barriers to the delivery of reliable applications. These barriers prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun."

Perhaps Tom Siebel should apply his golf strategy to his business dealings. The Siebel Systems founder finished a respectable sixth place with partner John Senden earlier this month at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.