ShadowRAM: November 29, 2004

"What is that?" you may ask. Iris was Ray Ozzie's brainchild, founded officially on Dec. 7, 1984, with the blessing of (and funding from) Lotus Development founder Mitchell Kapor.

Five years later to the day, Notes 1.0 launched to much fanfare at the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in Somerville, Mass. (Did Ozzie have some sort of Pearl Harbor fixation?) Anyway, Sheldon Laube, then with Price Waterhouse, waxed eloquently about the transformative nature of this new collaborative/groupware software at that launch.

Laube became a media superstar. He was in the trade rags! Dailies! Conferences! We loved this guy. He was so omnipresent some journalists had their own multiple-Laube theories. "I wanted to get him on the horn and then have someone else call him just to see if there was more than one Laube," said one writer.

There's a great "Yahooligan" item on reemer.com. The blurb, which I could not verify, says the Yahoo corporate office sports conference rooms with names such as "Sane" and "Competent." This gives rise to such Marxian repartee as "We're in Sane at 11" or "Be in Adequate at noon."

"In Continent after lunch"? OK, I made that last one up. Hey, if it ain't true, it should be.

Word out of Microsoft is the Office vs. Server rivalry continues apace, especially as the Office/Infoworker guys prep more Office Servers based on technology coming out of—you guessed it—the Server group.

Microsoft will expand its Simple SAN program beyond Hewlett-Packard to include other storage vendors such as Left Hand Networks and Network Appliance next quarter, little birdies say. Those two companies back iSCSI-based SAN approaches that compete with Fibre Channel models. Prices for Fibre Channel SANs are dropping fast, but iSCSI seems better suited for midmarket use.

Meanwhile, support for iSCSI from HP and IBM remains murky. The server groups at both companies back it, while their storage-side colleagues are dragging their heels. Dell, meanwhile, is furious at EMC for also being slow to get into this space because it sees a major opportunity to steal a march on HP and IBM slipping away.

LG Electronics, which manufactures IBM notebooks at the moment, has begun selling its own line of similar models in Canada. Of course, thanks to the Web and NAFTA, those LG brands are trickling into the United States. And don't be surprised if you see them being marketed in the United States through the channel in 2005. LG has cancelled its ThinkPad contract with IBM and will stop making ThinkPads for IBM next year.