ShadowRAM: September 20, 2004

That ignited a week of debate over the capabilities of Big Blue's old line of typewriters. Let's hope the next scandal this election year doesn't spark debate over OS/2's capabilities.

HP may have market share, and Lexmark may have a lucrative OEM deal with Dell, but Ricoh has Godzilla. The printer and copier vendor recently installed one of its high-end units in the New York apartment of Hideki "Godzilla" Matsui, the New York Yankees leftfielder and cult figure in Japan. Ricoh has been cozying up to the Bronx Bombers all year, spending liberally on TV spots for the Yankees' cable network. When the Yankees played the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in Japan earlier this year, each team had the Ricoh logo emblazoned on the side of their baseball caps--a marketing coup.

Hollywood may have been the scene for last year's Ingram Micro VentureTech Network Fall Invitational, but this year's event at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas will bring the distributor and its partners to the small screen. During the conference, an A&E camera crew was filming "Caesars: The Series," a new reality show. One of the show's producers told Bob Stegner, Ingram Micro's vice president of U.S. channel marketing, that they had enough good footage from the VTN event to warrant its own episode. No one's sure when it will air or what will be in it, but one possibility is a staged rendition of "Family Feud," in which VTN's Lone Star and Heartland chapters (aka the Redneckers and the Hayseeds) compete over who knew more about VTN. The winner? The audience, which roared at VTN members such as Steve Harper, Ted Warner, Tommy Wald and Greg Starr playing hillbillies.

If Michael Haley, vice president of Arrow Electronics' SBM division, asks you to go jogging, you may want to politely decline. Haley went for a morning jog last week to take in the mountain scenery around the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colo., where Arrow gathered top HP partners for its first Alliance Summit. But the jog was cut short when Haley came across a black bear in someone's front yard about 25 feet away. Luckily, he didn't surprise the bear. He stopped, made eye contact and slowly backed away. Haley said he knew he had to stay calm because it was his fifth such encounter. Thanks for the jogging offer, Mike, but we'll stick to the treadmill.