I don’t think we’ll be talking much longer about how Wal-Mart is destroying small-town America.

In a 4-person startup, the CEO’s job includes cleaning up the nasty mess in the fridge.

The price eBay paid for Skype has a whiff of the frothiest days of the dotcom bubble.

It’s time to work on my evil laugh.

I believe Northwest when they say they can keep flying even with the mechanics on strike. I think they’ve been planning this for a very long time.

It’s not actually that hard to figure out what a stealth mode startup is doing.

The release of some old TV shows on DVD has been held up by problems getting licenses for all the music. A number of TV shows used pop songs as background (or even foreground) music, and now the rightsholders of those tunes want additional royalties for DVD release.

None of this should be surprising. When the shows were originally created there was no market for consumer sales of TV shows (except maybe for made-for-TV movies or things like National Geographic specials). As a result, nobody thought about this licensing issue until suddenly DVDs created the market.

I'm at the SpeechTEK West conference/trade show in San Francisco this week, and I was chatting with a consultant I know about our respective books (his forthcoming, mine published). An industry analyst of our mutual acquaintance interjected the too-obvious-to-ask question:

"What are the economics of writing a book? How do you make any money off it?"

"Vertical integration doesn't work" is a relatively recent management insight. Recent enough that there's still a lot of people debating the question (especially those clinging to failed vertical integration strategies). But the most successful industries of the past few decades--personal computing, networking, and anything Internet-based--are all aggressively horizontal. I expect the debate to die down within a few years as it becomes "obvious" that with only a few exceptions, horizontal is the way to go.

Mostly this is good. Horizontal integration allows maximal innovation and competition in every piece of a product or service. This drives down costs, advances technology, and generally makes the world a happier place (except for middle management, which is more likely to get fired as part of a lean-and-mean strategy).

Remember TheStreet.com? I subscribed back when it was the go-to website for stocks and I was in the investment banking business. Neither is true any more.

I finally got around to canceling my subscription, since, well, I basically don't read it any more (that and it's more expensive than the Wall Street Journal). I sent them an E-mail asking them to cancel my subscription. They refused, telling me I could only cancel by phone (and only during working hours).

"We really need a new sign for our booth," I announced. "One which says, 'We Are Not Seeking Financing At This Time.'"

"Don't bother," David, my VP of Development, replied. "The sign would only encourage them."

1. Nobody really understands marketing.

2. Anybody who claims to understand marketing is trying to sell you something.

Back when the Internet was still a novelty, the conventional wisdom was that customer service through E-mail would save companies a bundle. It hasn't worked that way. Not by a long shot.

Many companies strive to build customer and employee loyalty, and for good reason. Loyal customers are often willing to pay more, and are less likely to be swayed by the competition. Loyal employees are less likely to quit when the company goes through a rough patch, and are generally willing to work for less than what they would receive elsewhere.

What many executives don't understand, though, is that loyalty is reciprocal. Loyalty is a mutual (if unspoken) agreement to take each other's interests into consideration. Loyalty cannot be bought, but can only be earned through an ongoing demonstration that the loyalty is mutual. I'll be loyal to you if you're loyal to me.

Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla in the technology world, and it takes a lot of hard work to avoid using their products if you do any kind of computing at all. But here, at a combined conference which is about 80% dedicated to Microsoft developers (the other 20% being about speech recognition technology), the Microsoft effect is truly overwhelming. We drink Microsoft Water, breathe Microsoft Air, and get our sunlight through Microsoft Windows (sorry, couldn't resist).

I'm writing this from the combined Microsoft MDC/VSLive/AVIOS-SpeechTEK conference in San Francisco. What these three shows have to do with each other is something of a mystery to me, but here we are anyway. Bill Gates will be giving his opening keynote address in a few minutes. This will be the first time I've seen Gates speak in person, and I'll record some of my impressions as we go.

I'm writing this article from 30,000 feet, on board a flight which will eventually take me to San Francisco for a trade show the remainder of the week. To my own surprise, and the disappointment of Northwest Airlines, the plane I'm on bears not the red tail of Northwest, but one of the many wildlife photos Frontier uses.

I discovered a nice blog today (if infrequently updated) about marketing and branding. Being in the business of evaluating companies' customer service, I've had this rant brewing for a while, and this seems like as good an opportunity as any to let it free.

Before going into politics, George W. Bush spent time as a businessman, including some CEO stints. Interesting, then, that the war in Iraq displays some of the same classic project management mistakes I see all the time in corporate America when it comes to implementing big IT projects. The difference is, in Iraq, we all get to see the mistakes played out 24/7 on CNN.

Thanks to these and other mistakes, large IT projects fail far more often than they succeed. Let's take a look: