OK, NOW WE'RE TALKIN'! TAKE IT RAY BABY! TAKE IT! NOW!!!! WE NEED YA'
CHECK OUT JUST WHAT I HAVE IN STARS!!!
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ShadowRAM
It's March Madness, and I'm talking mergers, not NCAA
basketball.
Spies report that Vanstar's Bill Tauscher has paid some friendly visits
to Entex HQ. Could a merger be in the offing? Makes sense to me.
With the Merisel FAB/Synnex deal on the horizon, you have to
figure at some point Vanstar will lose the Merisel distribution
business it retained from the ComputerLand sale. And it needs
critical volumes to feed its channel assembly/configuration business,
especially since Vanstar is building a huge manufacturing facility in
Indianapolis. And Entex needs to figure a quick way to go public
and gain more capital.
While that deal makes sense, this one I can't figure out: Compaq
looking at Gateway 2000? That's the buzz on The Street these days.
If Eckhard Pfeiffer is that afraid of Dell, why doesn't he just buy
Dell? Maybe he just wants to join Ted Waitt in those hokey,
barnyard ads.
Don't expect to see Big Daddy David Dukes at Ingram Micro for
awhile. The proud papa is taking paternity leave to spend time with
new daughter, Kassidy Jean, born last Monday at 9 lbs.
Check this out. Intelligent Electronics was apparently shopping its
business around to Merisel. That's a riot. Merisel has barely a dime
to spend on anything.
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Speaking of dough, the headhunter world is abuzz with talk that
Novell has offered Oracle's Ray Lane a cool $20 million signing
bonus to become chairman and CEO. I'm available if he isn't.
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Was Microsoft stalking Netscape on its East Coast press tour last
week? Netscape was showing off the latest Communicator beta.
"Everywhere we went, Microsoft had either just been there or was
about to arrive," complained one Netscaper. Microsoft, meanwhile,
was touting Internet Explorer 4.0, release date unspecified but
thought to be mid-March, and also managed to throw together a
white paper and a demo on Dynamic HTML. "It's a paradigm shift,"
one Microsoftie assured us. "It's so new we can't even articulate it
yet."
Lotus' knickers were all in a twist again last week. The Lotus folks
claim that Netscape claimed that Lotus Domino does not support
AIX. Got that? "Perfidious lies," screamed various Loti.
"Puh-lease. We've only supported AIX for seven years!" So what
exactly is going on with the RS/6000 and SuiteSpot and/or Domino?
In late January, IBM's RS/6000 crew was very bullish on Netscape
and promised an aggressive marketing/promo campaign with it to be
announced Feb. 11.
Funny thing, we don't think it ever got announced. Now the
RS/6000 folks are all warm and fuzzy over Domino and a new
PowerNet bundling program.
Word has it that the infamous 12 Portland developers, headed by
VP Gary Kelly, who jumped ship from Informix to Oracle, were
unhappy with Informix's direction. Specifically, they felt management
was giving too much attention to Universal Server and neglecting the
mainline DS and XPS products. The last straw was the hiring of a
manager, Eric Miles, to oversee all labs, including Portland.
This whole channel assembly thing is getting way out of hand. First
came IBM PCs. Now the giant is looking at extending final assembly
to printers, networking hardware and NCs.
And Digital, not to be left out of the mad rush, is poised to strike a
deal with MicroAge for final assembly of its desktop PC. MicroAge
and Digital executives were huddled last week and hope to unveil
something next week.
More on Office 97 channel snafus. A VAR called Microsoft's
reseller line with some configuration questions and was told to refer
his customer to a hardware OEM who bundles the software.
Assist me! Call me at (800) 521-DIME; fax (617) 487-7599; or
send E-mail to me at Shadowram@mcimail.com.
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JOE... |
