ShadowRAM: July 25, 2005

Vendors looking to pitch Nth&'s customers during the event had to follow these rules: Stay on schedule and leave attendee packets for customers. The vendors also were forbidden from way-laying customers in the halls, talking during other presentations or lurking in the back of meeting rooms.

Attendees who registered in time to qualify for Nth&'s pre-negotiated price for a room at the Disney Grand Californian hotel near the Disneyland and California Adventure theme parks got room rates of about $200. Latecomers were quoted rates of about $500. That price hike was due to Disneyland&'s 50th anniversary celebration. That anniversary brought out a few celebs, including Stevie Wonder, who was the guest in Baldwin&'s room before Baldwin moved in.

Since I&'m in the market for new wheels, maybe Richard Hussey of Lyme Computer Systems in Lyme, N.H., can give me some good pointers on taking home a new car. Hussey was the super-duper Super Grand Prize winner of LG Electronics&' Life&'s Rewards Program. His prize? A brand-new Lexus RX 400H, which is billed as the first luxury hybrid SUV. All for selling a few LG LCD products! (Hussey earned a raffle chance for the Lexus with each monitor he sold.)

Word outta Redmond—and Fargo, too, for that matter—is that Microsoft Business Solutions feels under attack by its own. Case in point: Mendocino. That&'s the Office-to-SAP bridge product Microsoft and SAP are developing together. At the recent partner conference, various muckety-mucks said they felt they didn&'t need to express their plans for better Office-to-MBS tie-ins because they should be assumed. You know what they say about assuming …

Isn&'t it ironic that Microsoft, famous for luring execs away from competitors, should sue Kai-Fu Lee for going over to Google? Microsoft is justly known for targeting strategic execs at rival companies and bringing them aboard. That tradition goes back to Mike Maples and Mike Sinneck (IBM), Roger Heinen (Apple), Brad Silverberg and Paul Gross (Borland), and Joe Eschbach (Adobe). Guess what&'s good for the monopolist ain&'t good for the upstart.

In a complaint filed last week, Microsoft charged that by accepting a Google job, Lee violates a non-compete he signed five years ago. It also names archenemy Google for assisting him in this endeavor.