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As President Obama considers the military options that are being offered to him in Afghanistan, by a Pentagon machine that always seems much too keen to spend money, munitions, and body counts beyond what most of us could sleep with, it may be useful to consider where everything stands.Obama inherited two wars. One was not his choice – as voted by him as the then-junior Senator from the State of Illinois – and which he has declared will be over for the troops in 2011. Why 2011? Why not 2009? The Iraqis don’t want the US forces in their country, the troops surely don’t want to be there – even if the Generals are still having fun with risking their lives – and it would seem that the totally logical thing would be to bring the whole stupid, uncalled-for affair to closure as quickly as possible. It would also be of immeasurable help to the US economy to get those bills reduced as soon as possible and to get the unimaginable number of private contractors out of there – peo...

Sprint has not been having much business fun this past couple of years. They have lost subscribers at a high rate compared to other carriers because of service issues, although this is not the first time that they have seen their fortunes fall. Knowing people who have previously been laid off at the Overland Park, Kansas corporation, you get the feeling that their operations are not run by the best of management.One of the hopes that Sprint has had in recent months was the initial exclusive handling of the Palm Pre (or Pré?),  the phone that’s “thinking ahead for you.”It is a fact that months after a new phone’s release, with the number of months depending on the success of the product, it starts to get discounted. The discounting started quite early for the Palm device, which is not good news for Palm, who also need some business success to happen after the virtual death of the PDA market (what a surprise that was…). Actually, on the Palm web site, there is a l...

July and August have always been slower months in our industry. Summer vacations and public holidays at the beginning and end of the period all contribute to things being quieter. In the same way our web traffic slows a little; but, unusually, in the month of August 2009, although our overall number of unique visitors fell a little, those visitors went to more ZONEs than usual, increasing our visitor traffic literally across the board.Something else also slows down during the summer: product releases. I have always wondered whether this is because of some perception that the press will not be around to take notice? (I don’t know if that is even true.) Or is it because the vendors find it much more difficult to get sample product into the right hands? Or perhaps their own staff vacations make it difficult to coordinate releases?Whichever it is, there is, this year, something else happening – or not happening – in the companies I cover. They are not, save one, talking of their September produc...