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“Ah! Thats the government I know. Declare something an urgent priority, then take the summer off!” the Maven of Murmur meditated, as he noted that the FTC had said authentication was the best way to fight spam but wouldnt lift a finger on e-mail authentication until the fall.
The FTC probably thinks spammers will take the summer off, too—and the authentication folks wont write a line of code until the fall, either, thought Spencer. Of course, the FTC would be wrong, as his contacts corroborated. “The FTC didnt acknowledge that people are already toiling away on authentication systems,” said Anne Mitchell, CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and aka the Diva of Deliverability in the anti-spam community.
Mitchell said maybe a summer conference on whether homeowners should install flush toilets was taking precedence at the FTC over an e-mail authentication summit.
As the Puss pondered, he got a call from a pal who pointed out that during Oracles recent earnings call, CFO Jeff Henley said the company would make two multibillion-dollar acquisitions in the next year. Naturally, one of those is PeopleSoft. Henley let the other acquisition remain a mystery, which got the Puss and his pal speculating. In his March 29 column, El Gato wondered if reports of Larry Ellison spending mucho quality time at Lawson Software might indicate that Oracle plans to buy the ERP player. Lawson execs said the company is not for sale, prompting the pal to consider BEA another possible purchase target. Ellison said hed love to scoop up BEA if the price was right, although it would be hard to envision CEO Alfred Chuang letting the house that he, Bill Coleman and Ed Scott built go at a bargain price. Oracle could also be eyeing Siebel, as a way to boost its CRM line. If Salesforce.com ever launches its IPO, Ellison could view Siebel as ripe for the taking in an effort to propel Oracles On Demand plans.
Spence bid his pal adieu and skatted over to the New England Business and Technology Association meeting at Bostons posh Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel. There, the Tawny Titan was enthralled as genome guru Juan Enriquez, CEO of Biotechonomy, hypothesized a scenario in which the saliva of mosquitoes could someday be genetically engineered to deliver a payload of beneficial substances instead of the usual itch-inducing ingredients. “Mmm, Id vote for martini-filled mosquitoes,” mused the Mouser. “And when the gene splicers are done with that, maybe they could genetically re-engineer Microsofts development team to only deliver software thats impervious to viruses.”