I chuckled when I read Phil Wainewright's post Ever been Oprah'd?. It talks about the spike in web traffic whenever Oprah mentions a company or its products. I chuckled because he heard it from Ken Harris, CIO at Shaklee.
Don't get me wrong. Ken has a great CIO resume - with brands like The Gap and Nike on it. But I ran into Ken during the Oracle/PeopleSoft hostile bid. He and I were on opposite sides as expert witnesses - he represented Oracle - in one of the legal proceedings during that episode.
What does that have to do with Oprah? In the late 90s, Oracle kept going back and forth between a fat and thin client architecture for its applications. Given Oprah's own weight fluctuations, the inside joke among some Gartner analysts then was the real Big "O" was based in Redwood Shores, not Chicago.
Since then, Oprah has been known to host several Fusion chefs in her shows and magazines. Oracle, of course, hosts several Fusion developers....
