ShadowRAM: August 2, 2004

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared the week of Oct. 3, when the show runs at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, as "New York Technology Week." (It's also the first week of baseball playoffs, so if you out-of-town folks have friends who are Yankee fans you might want to get your ticket requests in early.)

On the left coast, we heard Novell quietly closed up its San Francisco office last week and told employees to work from home. During the Bob Frankenberg days, the company's operations were run out of the West Coast, so this is another one of those "end of an era" moves, it seems. Speaking of era ends, former Oracle channel muckety-muck Jack Lee surfaced last week from his new post as vice president of business development at CompuWare.

IBM's decision last week to swap out channel chief Mike Borman for software executive Donn Atkins had tongues wagging. We bet the company's decision to lay off fewer workers than expected due to offshore outsourcing"a disclosure that probably went over well with labor groups"helped deflect attention.

Attendees at the recent Rational Software Development User Conference were disappointed by the show's news content. IBM previewed the next release of its Rational desktop tools, released tools for Lotus Workplace and unveiled an initiative to provide resources to universities to set up developer curricula. But many expected more strategic announcements from IBM's biggest tools show of the year"especially since attendees were stuck in the middle of nowhere, Grapevine, Texas"in the hottest part of the summer. At least there was AC.

While we're on the road ... Steve Dallman, Intel's director of North America channel marketing, will be among the headliners for a series of D&H road shows on digital convergence scheduled for next month in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Dallas; Chicago; and Santa Clara, Calif. During the event, Intel will preview future motherboard designs that include onboard support for wireless access points. Channel chiefs from LG Electronics, D-Link and ViewSonic are also expected.

We learned last week through an exceptional blog, Spyware Warrior (http://netrn.net/spywareblog/), that Trekeight"which makes an application called SpywareNuker"has filed a defamation lawsuit against antivirus maker Symantec. It seems the security giant has targeted SpywareNuker as adware for more than a year. Trekeight says it ain't so, and that being called "adware" isn't a good thing for business.