Total Recall

“This must be how Phil Collins felt before he jetted off on the Concorde to play gigs in London and Philly on the same day for the 85 Live Aid concert,” thought Spence as he faced the latest doozy cooked up by the corporate travel department.

First, Hair Force One barreled down to the Big Easy for Microsofts Worldwide Partner Conference. The Furry One felt very fortunate to be lodging solo at the W Hotel for the evening after hearing several Redmondites gripe about having to share rooms with their colleagues. “Wonder if Bill and Steve room together,” mused the Maven of Murmur.

Hustling to attend the 5 hours of keynote addresses that began at 7:30 a.m., the Kitty encountered a slight delay concerning his e-mail-confirmed press pass for the show. “Um. Youre not running the event registration through Small Business Server 2003, are you?” Spencer inquired. The attempt at humor went over like a lead balloon.

However, His Hairness soon hightailed it out of Microsofts mind-numbing marathon of keynotes. The Flying Furball landed in San Diego in time to catch Siebel User Weeks evening of entertainment featuring Huey Lewis and the News. One had to wonder how the bland band, which also played for techies at the PeopleSoft Connect show in Anaheim recently, ended up as the entertainment for an evening organizers labeled “World Beat” night. “Mmm, maybe their song “Bad Is Bad” had a bigger global impact than I realized,” snickered the Snide Scribe.

A customer demo of Siebels new Analytics platform during a keynote session was the source of another kind of amusement. Three representatives of a consumer electronics distributor called Nova Electronics staged a demo of how they use Siebels software to manage their reseller channel in Australia. But Siebel neglected to say that Nova Electronics is a faux company and that the three “Australian” Nova reps were really Siebel employees. Spence suspected not all was fair dinkum when the ersatz Aussies spoke with American accents, but he also suspected that many in attendance had been misled by the caper.

Since Salesforce.com has crashed Siebel events in the past with protesters waving “Down with Software” signs, the Mouser was bemused to see only a banner across from the convention center that declared, “Salesforce.com: Success, not Siebel.” Maybe, he meditated, that whole Dalai Lama fiasco has bestowed enlightenment upon the Benioff Bunch.

As Californians groped with the reality of new leadership under Gov. Schwarzenegger, the Golden-State-grokking Grimalkin nodded knowingly to note that closet samurai Larry Ellison had attended the premiere of Quentin Tarantinos new flick, named—what else?