Novell gets a good chunk of Shadowram (CRN) time this week...
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ShadowRAM
You have to hand it to the BoSox. This year, the team had enough decency to die early in the season and stay dead, sparing us at least one fall heartbreak. Then what happens? They make a last-ditch bid
for the wild card spot, beat the Chisox in a weekend series, and to top it off, Roger Clemens strikes out20 (TWENTY!) Tigers in a 4-0 shutout.
Does anyone else think Novell's marketing department is going a bit--how shall I say it--haywire? At the IntranetWare launch, the company had the Rhythmics, a band that plays on garbage can lids, highway dividers and other urban elements. "They play with what they've got, just like us," explained a Novell marketing type. Strange from a company with a billion-plus dollars in the bank. The news that Steve Markman departed for General Magic was nearly lost in the show excitement. Nearly.
Then there was the "Fight of the Century," on which the company spent millions in advertising. It was supposed to be NT and NetWare duking it out, but Microsoft didn't show up, although Sugar Ray Leonard and fight announcer Al Bernstein did. Novell execs said that Bill Gates didn't respond to an E-mail invitation. Maybe he was preoccupied with the upcoming CID (Civil Investigative Demand) coming from the Justice Department regarding Microsoft's browser effort. In all the hubbub, lost was the fact that development of NDS for NT was actually outsourced by Novell to NetVision, a little-known Linden, Utah,
company.
Microsoft's Jim Allchin was a mite embarrassed when the company's Distributed File System didn't work in his demo, but that snafu didn't keep him from from using the words "cool" and "excited" a total
of 87 times. And why were other Microsoft executives handing out flyers for show events? That's an expensive promotion.
Microsoft has hired an NYC convention center for the first meeting on publishing ActiveX and invited 70 vendors and customers plus CRN to vote on what to do with the beast. A standards body is one option,
quoth Microsoft. Meanwhile, ActiveX has many faces. Originally a plain OLE control, it has now been described by various Microsofties as scripting, HTML style sheets and plumbing that lets components
("some of which are platform-specific and some not") talk to each other. "There's a lot of hand-waving around ActiveX," said SunSoft prez Janpieter Scheerder, who will send a rep to New York. "If Windows
goes into the public domain, that's another story, but I haven't seen that news." Microsoft says developers can always write ActiveX controls in Java.
The biggest Interop coup was Cabletron's booking of Father Guido Sarducci (the guy who invented Find the Pope in the Pizza) performing Last Rites for conventional router technology. The real miracle,
however, was Cabletron's conversion to that ole time channel religion.
Resellers may have a problem upgrading the US Robotics Courier flash-upgradable modems. The upgrade, available on the Web, was posted May 29. One VAR destroyed a modem with the problematic code. USR officials agree there is a problem, which is why they helpfully posted a README file June 28 with the upgrade. The README is supposed to reinstall code so the modem will accept the upgrade. While estimates range as high as 5,000 Courier modems affected, USR officials said problems were sporadic and minimal and the version will fix everything.
Look for some high level OS/2 departures. Word is Warp evangelist David Barnes is heading to Cambridge to work at an IBM subsidiary that shall go nameless. Wally Casey already has a new gig at IBM's General Business Solutions.
What do you hear on OS/2? Call (800) 521-DIME; Shadowram@mcimail.com; fax (617)-487-7599.
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Joe... |
