The goal of any marketing campaign is to get attention for your company and product. Ideally, this attention should be positive and reflect what you want people to think about the brand, but it you're young and unknown, almost any sort of attention (short of the kind which includes the word "indicted") will do.

Simply stated, hard to accomplish.

This is in the "They Still Don't Get It?!" category: starting today , a company called Unicast will be displaying full-motion full-screen full-audio TV commercials on web browsers when the user leaves certain sites. According to the New York Times article, you will be happily browsing a participating site (say, MSN, or iVillage). When you leave the site, a 30-second TV commercial starts playing in your browser window. You have the option of clicking past the commercial, but if you do nothing, you get the whole shebang, audio and all.

A front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal (free link should work for a week) headlined "Large Software Customers Refuse to Get With the Program" brings me back to an article I wrote a couple months ago about the maturing software industry . The thrust of the WSJ article is that (a) large enterprise software companies are having a hard time getting customers to upgrade, so they're (b) raising support costs and dropping support for older versions in a bid to raise more revenue, which is leading their customers to (c) switch vendors or go to internally supporting the software because they no longer see the value in upgrading. None of this is unexpected, and it is symptomatic of a seismic shift in the software industry which will be felt particularly hard in Redmond.

We recently had a development server die (fried motherboard). This, in itself, is no great surprise. This was the first server we bought when we started this company two years ago, and you expect stuff to fail from time to time. The surprise was how long it has taken us to pick up all the pieces.

Half of the money we spend on marketing is wasted. The problem is that we never know which half.

Today is like spring, with bright sun, highs in the 50's, and that earthy, humid smell I associate with thawing ground. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some confused bulbs poke their heads above the soil, if this keeps up for more than a few days.

As for myself, I'm back in the office, working on producing a customized demo deliverable for a large customer (call it N) which plans to private-label our services. N isn't currently our biggest customer, though they could be if we could get the wheels turning a little faster over there. N is one of those giant conglomerates which has sold something to probably every company in North America with over 500 people at one time or another.

Technology companies, and software companies in particular, do a great job of growing. They don't do such a great job of maturing. That is to say, when it comes time to transition from a growth-oriented business model to a more mature replacement-oriented business model, a lot of companies fall flat on their faces. This is not merely hypothetical: Microsoft will almost certainly have to confront this issue over the next few years, as it runs out of new "must have" features to force its customers to upgrade.

The consumer software business generates revenue mainly by doing two things: bringing new users into a piece of software, and getting existing users to upgrade. Without upgrade revenue, the total size of the market is limited.

After nearly 10 hours of travel to get from Minneapolis to Miami, then another hour in stop-and-go traffic at 1 AM (yes, I'm not making this up), we finally arrived at our hotel around 1:30 AM to a rude surprise. The hotel was overbooked, and there was no room for us.

Never mind that, had we not arrived at all, the hotel would still have charged us for a night in a room they didn't have (due to their 24-hour cancellation policy). Not only was there no room in the hotel we had booked, there was no room in any other hotel within five miles.

I've never understood why trade shows and conventions are always in glamorous big cities like New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. It would be more productive (and a lot cheaper) to go to Des Moines, Iowa, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

To all those entrepreneurs with innovative, unique business ideas who want to capitalize on them before someone else does, I have one piece of advice: Get over it.

Parties, schmoozing, junkets, respect and admiration, what's not to like about the glamorous life of running a startup?

I'm in Manhattan today for an industry conference which runs all next week. We've got a booth, we're sponsoring one of the major events, and I'm going to spend a lot of my time talking to an audience. So what am I doing with my day off before the action starts?

Well, this evening, I stuffed 450 CDs into jewel cases and envelopes.