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Hotlanta wasnt, thanks to a cold snap. No matter, Spence found himself in the metropolis of the New South with a job to do, covering the CTIA Wireless show. Right off, the show offered a riddle that could be answered only with a question: This man doesnt threaten Alex Trebeks job security. Answer: Who is Scott McNealy? The Sun head honchos presentation began with a cute spoof of the TV game show “Jeopardy,” but it quickly dissolved into a canned demo.
As is often the case, the mobile Mouser found the show festivities more fertile for rumors than the show floor. At a party sponsored by Seven, the folks from Danger demonstrated the next version of the companys Hiptop phone/PDA. Due by the end of this year, the latest Hiptop is trim and sleek, almost making the current version seem bulky in comparison. Spence also rocked out along with a few hundred other attendees at a multivendor-sponsored Alanis Morissette concert at Atlantas Coca-Cola Roxy Theatre. While Alanis served up her manic-depressive melodies of anger and love, the Kitty pawed a new Nokia 6820 that the company gave him to play with during the show. The Katt dialed a pal in Cali and heard that Larry Ellison had been spotted spending a lot of time at Lawson Software, schmoozing with execs and taking in the sights. “Could Lawson, an enterprise applications vendor thats big in HR, financials and health care, be part of Larrys contingency planning if PeopleSoft gets away?” Spence wondered. The next night found the Kitty rocking out again, this time at a Train concert sponsored by Sony Ericsson. When the band re-emerged for an encore, the house lights came up to reveal a black, strapless bra on the microphone. “Im switching to Sony Ericsson!” said the lead singer.
Checking up on Novells BrainShare in Salt Lake City, the Kitty IMed a Wasatch-area crony. The pal thumbed back that normally sedate Novell CEO Jack Messman waxed Dean-like as he began his keynote by raising his fist and yelling “Novell is back” and “This year, BrainShare dont need no freakin Windows!” Messman said all Novell staff will move from Windows to Linux and OpenOffice. The crony confided that even the usually serene Linus Torvalds was pumping the crowd into a frenzy by lobbing at attendees anti-“Longhorn” T-shirts that read “No Bull!” Just as Novell is trying to unite the best of KDE and GNOME into a unified Linux desktop, the pal posited Novell may utilize a similar combo strategy to fortify its GroupWise for Linux and SuSE Linux Openexchange collaboration suites.
The Kitty chuckled when the source said Messman must have taken his meds by the time of the Q&A because the CEO told reporters with a straight face that Novells Linux strategy, particularly on the desktop, wasnt anti-Microsoft. It was the entire open-source community that owned the Linux source code, he said, and so it was the community, not Novell, taking on Microsoft. “Sounds like Messman could collaborate on bipolar anthems with Alanis,” cackled the Kitty.