ShadowRAM: February 24, 2003

Just a week earlier, Hewlett-Packard's partner gathering opened with a similar human-spoked steel-wheel act. Dan Vertrees, HP's vice president of enterprise partners for the Americas, even got into the wheel. After Vertrees' stunt, Duane Zitzner, executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group, confessed he used to roll inside wheels when he was a kid in Wisconsin,but his mode of transportation was a tractor tire.

We hear IBM Software is trying to bring HP solution providers into the IBM fold. We already reported that IBM is funding HP integrators starting or beefing up their IBM practices. Now a similar effort is under way on the software side with a pilot project in Europe.

IBM's retiring channel chief, Peter Rowley, spent much of his time at PartnerWorld attending farewell parties. Rowley, author of IBM's Business Partner Charter, told us that when the powers that be at IBM would call him after HP or some other vendor had launched a new channel initiative wanting to know what he was going to do in response, more often than not his reply was, "Nothing." That has resulted in stability, predictability and share gains for IBM and its partners. Rowley's exit from IBM is like Gary Cooper walking off into the sunset,we won't see the likes of him anytime soon.

Speaking of movie legends, "Gangs of New York" director Martin Scorsese gave IBM a high-five last week for supporting efforts to restore and preserve old films through a project he helped launch at UCLA.

During a press Q&A at the Intel Developer Forum last week, Intel CEO Craig Barrett shot back a question to a reporter holding an Apple laptop: "When are you going to get a real PC?"

The release to manufacture date for Windows 2003 has slipped again ever so slightly to March 12 from Feb. 28. This should not impact the planned April 24 official launch of the much-delayed, much-hyped OS. The 64-bit SQL Server 2000 (aka Liberty) is still slated to debut that day as well.

Microsoft is a big company that sometimes, um, gets ahead of itself. Like last Wednesday when some soul posted the much-anticipated beta 2 of Office 11 (now called Office 2003) to the MSDN Web site, where subscribers could get at it. The errant beta was quickly pulled back, but not before word was out. So to speak.