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I got a phone call this evening from "Joe". (I don't think he'd mind my using his name, but I didn't think to ask his permission before writing this, and I don't want to bother him needlessly.)

Joe wanted to get into his website, and couldn't figure out how to get into his website, "Joes-site.com". We talked on the phone for ten minutes. His site uses Drupal, and I went into his site, set up a new username and password for him, and he tried using that without success. Was he inserting spaces anywhere? Was he capitalizing something that ought not be capitalized? How about flushing the cache on his browser?

The thing that was most confusing to me was that his site wasn't recording any failed attempts to log in. I had him open a DOS window and "ping" his site, to make sure the DNS was resolving to the right address. Finally, I asked him whether he was trying to connect on port 2082 or 2095, which are used for pulling up the administrative panel and the webmail interface. Finally, I realized that he was trying to log in to the Drupal site, not to his own. Once he went to http://joes-site.com, he logging in right away, slicker than, well, really slick.

If it was puzzling and frustrating to me, it must have been incredibly puzzling and frustrating to Joe. It's no secret that the "Whatever for Dummies" books are runaway best-sellers, not because the books are particularly helpful, but because people consider themselves dummies.

You know what's worse? Companies let their customers think they are dummies. Joe was NOT making a stupid mistake. It was simply an uncommon mistake (as far as I can tell.) Once you know better, you don't make that particular mistake again; but isn't that the way it works with everything?

The fact of the matter is, if the customer makes a mistake, it's the fault of the company for not setting up the system better. If you make an air conditioner, you shouldn't mark the temperature control "higher" and "lower", because it's not obvious whether "higher" means "make the air conditioner work harder" or it means "make the air condition work less hard, so the temperature is higher". Instead, you mark the controls "warmer" and "cooler".

For a long time, we did support by email. Finally, with trepidation, we got a toll-free telephone number. An experiment, we announced. We might not be able to afford it. It turned out that the phone bill was pretty small.

In fact, you could say the phone bill was negative. Instead of spending 20 minutes reading an email, trying to figure out the problem, and writing an email in response, and trading 5 emails over the course of a week, someone would call us up, we could ask the questions and get immediate answsers, and in many cases, we can solve their problem in 10 minutes, while they're still on the phone. It's really made our support job a lot easier.

More important, though, it's made our support better. E-mail has reached the point where it's almost unusable. More to the point, can you imagine what would have happened had we tried to solve Joe's problem via e-mail? Joe would have given up in frustration after three e-mails, thinking he was hopelessly over his head. That's obviously not true. Joe's a smart fellow. And we'd have lost a customer.

That's why we're not just willing to have customers call our toll-free line, but we encourage it. Call with problems. Call with questions. Call if it's Friday night and you're alone, and your ex- just announced his engagement to your best friend, and you just need to talk.

They say that in the middle of the night, you can call any phone number to find out what time it is. ("Do you know it's twenty after three?") Hey, call us. And it's OK to use us as a suicide prevention hotline, too. We know that dead people often stop paying for their websites. Besides, we've been there, too. You don't need a shrink, you just need a friend, right?

In the 1980s, we all saw a lot of bank mergers. If there are two branches of Starbucks a block apart, Starbucks is likely to build a new branch between them, but bankers don't work that way; they sell off their redundant branches. And with fewer banks around, a lot of those branches ended up in the hands of other companies.

When I saw the variety of businesses that were taking great advantage of those drive-thru windows, I decided that anyone with a local office really needed one. Your customers need to drop off papers, or make payments, or whatever, and if you make it possible for them to do that without leaving the dog locked up in the car, without showering and dressing up all spiffy, without letting the ice cream in the trunk melt, then they're going to be highly reluctant to do business somewhere else.

But drive-thru windows also isolate your customers. One business management expert tells small businessmen - and would-be small businessmen - that they should never use the drive-thru window at their bank. They should go inside, dressed impeccably, and be sure to be kind and complimentary to everyone, because when push comes to shove, you want every bank employee to be pushing and shoving on your behalf for that line of credit you're applying for. And at the drive-thru, you're just a cylinder that goes through a pneumatic tube.

It works that way with customers, too. So if you have a drive-thru, you want to do everything possible to get your customers to park and come inside, so that they develop a personal relationship. Hey, c'mon in, we've celebrating Joan's birthday, and there's cake. Hey, c'mon in, we just opened a branch in Cameltown, and you can go fishing for a prize. Hey, c'mon in, it's Wednesday, and we've got free hot dogs.

It's going to cost something to acquire a customer - and as a businessman, you need to know how much. A tax preparer will spend $100 in advertising to attract each customer whose annual fees total $100. A supermarket will spend $10 or more in advertising and loss leaders for each customer who comes in for their weekly shopping trip. A cable television franchise or a daily newspaper may spend $250 for each new subscriber.

And it costs just as much to lose an existing customer, even if you only see it in terms of slowly dropping revenue (or gains that aren't what they should be.) If you buy a popcorn machine for $600 and offer free popcorn every Friday, at the end of the year, you may have spent $700 or $800 - and earned it back ten-fold in customers retained, and customers gained. They don't do business with you because they get free popcorn. They do business with you because you're the kind of guy who is generous with his popcorn.

Joe Girard made it into the Guiness Book as the world's greatest salesman by selling cars for Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit. He'd ask if you smoke - and once he found out what brand, he didn't just give you a cigarette, he tossed you a pack of your own brand - he kept them all on hand. Want a drink? He had a bar in his office. After all, the Chevy he could sell you came from the same factory as the Chevy sold by the dealer across town.

His notion was that you already had made the decision to buy before you visited the showroom. The only question was where to buy, so his entire sales pitch amounted to "You're a helluva good guy, and I'm a helluva good guy, so why the hell don't you buy it from me?"

Shortly before I was first married, I was stressing out over details of the wedding. "Listen," my younger brother advised. "There are some battles you don't want to win - and this is one of them." It's always important for a businessman to keep an eye on costs - but customer support isn't a frill. It's the reason customers choose you rather than your competitor. You need to spoil your customers rotten.

Information Wants To Be Free. So do cattle.

That's why Joseph Glidden's invention of barbed wire transformed the west. It made fencing cattle less expensive than having the cattle stolen, er, uh, rustled, er, uh, liberated and eaten.

Barbed wire was an immediate success.

1874 there was 10,000 lb made and sold.
1875 there was 600,000 lb made and sold.
1876 there was 2,840,000 lb made and sold.
1877 there was 12,863,000 lb made and sold.
1878 there was 26,655,000 lb made and sold.
1879 there was 50,337,000 lb made and sold.
1880 there was 80,500,000 lb made and sold.
1881 there was 120,000,000 lb made and sold.
1882 there was 180,000,000 lb made and sold.

With barbed wire, you could fence in your land for less than 3c per running foot. With cattle selling for $10 and more apiece, barbed wire didn't take long to pay for itself.

Cattle rustlers didn't care much for barbed wire - and they weren't the only ones. Even today, every farm boy can tell you of terrible accidents where someone was terribly injured by falling into the savage stuff - and many of them bear scars from minor accidents like that.

One of the reasons Digital Rights Management (SRM) has been so unpopular among users has been the fact that it keeps buyers from enjoying the music that they've purchased. They can listen on the iPod, but not on the computer, in the living room, or in the car. Upgrade the operating system on your Mac, connect your iPod, and the iPod thinks the music is stolen, and deletes hundreds of songs, purchased at $1 apiece.

It's like falling into a barbed wire fence.

Recent changes in the law have made music on internet radio uneconomic. A radio station that broadcasts over the air pays much lower royalty rates than the same station broadcasting over the internet.

At the same time, television networks are discovering that when they make shows available online, their broadcast audience does not shrink, but it grows. Like a car dealer offering test drives, like an ice cream shop giving free tastes, like a heroin dealer giving you your first hit for free, sampling is a powerfully effective sales tool.

It seems like the folks setting up royalty fees for internet radio are shooting themselves in the foot, treating internet radio as a consumer to be milked, rather than a promotional tool to be exploited.

What does this all mean to you? Information is valuable - and it can be used successfully to promote your product or service.

That's true even if your product is information.

In the old days, audiences were drawn back to the movie house, week after week, by the use of cliffhangers. Today's television serials rarely end an episode by having Nell roped to the railroad tracks by Snidely Whiplash, but good screenwriters always leave you wanting more.

That leaves us with three rules:

1. Give your users valuable information
2. Make them want more, so they keep coming back
3. Keep adding information, so it's worth while coming back

Adding information is easy if you have a content management system - but that's what AmishHosting is for. Our business is all about making YOUR website more successful.

The National Lampoon published a book in 1974 called "The Job of Sex" It was a parody on the best-selling "The Joy of Sex". It wasn't the funniest book in the world, but then, the book it parodied wasn't all that great, either.

I tend to carry around reading matter, so that waiting time is never wasted, and because my tastes are so eclectic, people often ask me about the interesting titles I am reading. Someone saw that book, and commented that she'd never be caught dead reading that in public.

"It's not Joy of Sex," I pointed out, "it's Job. A parody."

"I saw that," she said. "If I thought sex was a chore, I sure wouldn't want anyone else to realize that!"

Job satisfaction has been deteriorating since 1995. It's now only 39% among those under 25, although it rises to nearly one in two among those over 55.

Part of that would be the level of success that has been achieved. The lowest levels of job satisfaction are among those making less than $15,000, while it's 52% with those making $50,000 or more. I think, however, that part of it is learning to work.

"Whatever you are doing, let your hearts be in your work," advises Colossians 3:23. While Mike Rowe has found some jobs to be dirty, there is no television show called "unworthy jobs". If a job's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all.

Nancy Ortberg says "I love to work". And you've probably felt that way. Almost every time I have started a new job, I have had trouble sleeping the night before. I'm so excited that I wake up early, and show up all bright and shiny, ready to set the world on fire.

And then it starts going downhill. The same thing happens in school. Ever see a first grader that wasn't excited about starting school, meeting new friends, learning to read, learning to do arithmetic? Their eyes bulge, they're so excited at the prospect - and yet within a couple of years, most of them have had all the joy and excitement beaten out of them. Line up, stand straight, stop talking, no chewing gum, hold up one finger or two to go to the bathroom, look here, don't go wandering around.

Sheesh. "Why Johnny Can't Read" isn't phonics - it's unfunfulness. Yeah, I just invented that word. It was fun to invent that word. And something we all need to ask is, "Is it fun yet?" Is it fun for ourselves? Is it fun for our subordinates? Is it fun for our customers, and fun for our vendors?

If it's fun, you don't have to pay your employees to do their jobs. They will want to do their jobs. All you have to do is to make sure they can afford to do their jobs. They need to pay their mortgages, and feed their dogs, keep the lights on, and send their kids to college. But if it's not fun, they need to buy some fun, besides.

There's a reason why they call it work. As a rule, people pay us for doing something they can't do, or because they won't do. If my wife needed brain surgery, I'd hire an expert, rather than doing it myself - but I'm capable of scraping paint, or mowing the grass, or doing a brake job. I can cook a better meal than most of the ones I eat in restaurants.

Scraping paint is a little on the boring side, but I can listen to music while I do it. I enjoy mowing the lawn; the fragrance of the cut grass is wonderful. I seem to bung up my hands every time I work on brakes, but knowing that the job is done right is pretty important to me. If I had enough time, I'd never hire anyone to do any of those things.

The reason why "equal pay" initiatives have never succeeded is that people usually don't get paid for what they do. They get paid for what they put up with. A secretary may have comparable worth as a truck driver - but she works in a quiet office with a coffee pot a few feet away, while he bounces up and down all day with the sun glaring at him.

Lousy bosses have to pay their employees more, because they'd rather work for a good boss. The late Smokey Yunick used to have a sign posted in his garage. It quoted a fair hourly price for top-notch repairs, a substantially higher rate "if you watch" and an outrageously high rate "if you help".

I used to be interesting. Then happily, I discovered there's more money in boredom. -
Hugh MacLeod

Hugh MacLeod is known for "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards", and one of them has caught fire. He calls it "the blue monster".

Hugh says "For too long, Microsoft has allowed other people - the media, the competition and their detractors, especially - tell their story on their behalf, instead of doing a better job of it themselves. We firmly believe that Microsoft must start articulating their story better - what they do, why they do it, and why it matters - if they're to remain happy and prosperous long-term".

I'd argue with that. They need to tell themselves what they're doing. If you're doing something really creative, people will notice. You're the first one to notice, of course. You smile a lot. You walk with a spring in your step. People get curious, and notice what you're doing. You become a magnet. People are drawn irresistably to people who make things happen.

Helen Kelley in the 1991 Ken Burns film, Empire of the Air said that soon after she started listening to radio, she stopped practicing the piano, because she didn't have to make her own music anymore. Seeing that interview was an ah-hah moment for Dave Winer: "It was a mistake to believe that creativity was something you could delegate, no matter how much better they were than you, because it's an important human activity, like breathing, eating, walking, laughing, loving."

I think we need to be careful how we define creativity, though. It's not just painting pictures and writing novels. You can create anything of value. Ice cream was boring, and sales kept dropping - until creative people introduced the super-premium brands came along. Coffee was boring - and now it's not.

Services can be creative, too. Waste Management wasn't very reliable about picking up our trash - and while they were swift to take our money, it didn't always get credited to our account. In disgust, I went looking for another hauler. A wonderfully vibrant woman called back from Butler Hauling. She was enthusiastic and excited. When they made their first pickup, I was a little apprehensive, because they weren't driving a fancy-dan garbage truck, but rather a stake truck with plywood added to make the sides solid, and the truck had seen better days.

Mrs. Butler, though, swung into action. She and the fellows working with her jumped down, grabbed the trash and tossed it high into the air to land on the truck bed. Whomp, whomp, whomp went the bags - and then one of the fellows picked up a candy wrapper that a passing school kid had tossed into the yard, and tossed it into the truck as well.

Most trash haulers I've dealt with, you were lucky to get them to take the trash you had bagged up. They'd break the bags, and leave a mess, at least once a month. This crew was looking to clean up a mess that wasn't part of their responsibility.

Do you think I told ten people that Butler Hauling was the best haulers I'd ever seen? The answer is no - because I told at least twenty. And I know that Mrs. Butler and the fellows were happy doing what they were doing, because they were smiling, and joking back and forth, and some weeks, they'd break into tune.

Life is short and the workday is too long to be doing something you hate. And it's probably not what you're doing, but how you do it, that makes the difference.

It's no fun being a captive. And work oughta be fun. It can be fun.

What's the worst job in the world? You can find someone who enjoys doing it. Doing it well is an important part of it. What's the dirtiest job you can think of? Call up the leader of your local FFA chapter, and ask him: he'll tell you that most farm boys enjoy spreading manure - and yes, it gets all over you when you do it. And millions of people enjoy, yes, enjoy changing their kids' diapers, because it's an act of love.

That's probably key to the whole thing. Work is a relationship. When we perform work, we're caring for people. If you don't love your fellow man, you've got more serious problems than work.

But if you choose a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.

I got a call the other day, from someone who had two websites with two hosting companies, one of which was AmishHosting. He wanted to move his other website to our servers.

Sometimes, it goes the other direction. It's a pain having to deal with multiple servers that work different ways. You win some, you lose some, and we know we're not the only good hosting company in existance. Lately, though, we've been winning a lot more than we're losing, and that's worrisome, in a way.

Insurance companies worry about "moral hazard". Moral hazard is the insurance equivalence of "insider trading". Insurance is about managing risks, and if the other guy knows something is bound to happen, the insurance company doesn't want to take the fall for it.

The same thing happens in other businesses. It's normally a compliment to have a customer give you more business, but it's always a worry that the customer knows something you need to know.

We get customers who don't realize that their spamming is evil ("But I was just trying to let people know my website exists." There are people who have infringing music or images on their websites. ("But I got it from such-and-so's site, and he didn't create the music, so it must be OK to use.") There are people who write scripts that forget to exit when they are done, tying up server resources. ("Well, after all, I'm not a programmer.")

When I investigated, I found out that much of the new business came from customers of a cut-rate hosting company. They'd been having a lot of downtime lately, and, well, the owner doesn't display much grace under the pressure of criticism.

Late in the last decade, I wasn't in the hosting business; I was a customer, with a number of sites at DreamHost. I did business with them for years, so it'd be foolish of me to assert that they're bad people to deal with; they're not.

On the other hand, they rented webspace to someone who figured how to gain root access. This criminal left things in shambles. He deleted a number of websites, destroyed a number of MySQL databases, and worst of all, managed to destroy many of their backup files. They rushed their hard drives to a data recovery specialist and at great expense, managed to recover some sites. Other sites went away forever.

Being a belts-and-suspender guy, I had my own backups and could have uploaded our sites in a few hours - but it took them days to get our server back into service. My regular users were undoubtedly wondering if our site would ever be up again - and were looking about for alternatives. We were wondering when our server would ever be available - and were looking about for alternatives.

And I could see other customers on their forum, customers who didn't have their own backups. If I was concerned, they were frantic. Normally, one of the owners would be on the forum daily, answering questions, there was nothing, nothing, in the way of forthcoming information. There is no way, I decided, to keep disasters from happening, and management was obviously engaged in recovery, but recovery isn't just a technical matter. It's a customer-relations matter as well. Failing to spend 10 minutes at a time, four times a day, posting notes providing information updates and assurances that they hadn't given up, probably would have been saved them $10,000 or more.

At that point, I decided that if I were ever in this business, I had to keep communications open with customers, no matter what. Customers deserve to be treated with respect - and if you disappear, they will assume the worst.

It does happen. A few years ago, I knew a web hosting company owner who started off offering hosting from his home, using a cable modem. That certainly kept his costs under control. There are several problems with that, however. He eventually got a T-1 line, trying to keep the server in his home, but costs are him alive. He shut down the business without notice, and refused to talk to anyone at all, leaving customers without access to their data - or to their domain names.

One of the problems with web servers in the home is that cable internet and DSL internet are asymmetrical services. You can pull data from the internet at a great rate of speed, often 6 mbps or 8 mbps, but data going from the computer to the internet (which is more than 90% of the traffic for a web server) is typically capped at 256 kbps or 384 kbps. That 20-to-1 ratio really affects server performance.

Second of all, when your server is in a bedroom (or, as pictured, in a bathroom), you're way off the internet backbone. Server speed is governed by both bandwidth speed and lag. If it takes several extra hops to get to backbone before heading to the user, that really slows things down. Furthermore, it leads to reliability problems. If a backbone router fails, it'll be replaced within an hour; if a router on the back roads of the internet fails, it might be the next day before anyone gets told it's down.

The other problem with cable internet is the cable companies. The cable industry is relatively young, and top management largely consists of entrepreneurs who went into cable systems after selling used cars and aluminum siding. Their technical skills don't make it easy to manage even a system originally intended to broadcast the same signal from one source to many destinations, a relatively simple task.

The internet, however, is not broadcasting. It consists almost entirely of two-way point-to-point communications. That's something that telephone company engineers struggle to optimize. The technological wizardry of the internet's founders (Al Gore not included) makes internet networking simpler than a phone system, but even so, used-car salesmen are disinclined to compete for top notch engineers that can make it happen. Many consumers (including me) have switched to satellite television because the cable systems do not even reliably provide good television signals.

So it is inevitable that someone who starts out with a server in his home will eventually move it into a data center, if for no other reason than to save money on connectivity. The chart shown here is for one of our servers over the past 24 hours. At peak, this server was delivering 3.559 mbps - about 8 times as fast as a cable modem would deliver - at about a tenth the cost of cable bandwidth.

And there are other benefits as well. In a data center, our servers are protected by halon fire suppression systems, armed guards, webcam security cameras, a building that's good for Category 4 hurricanes, and emergency generators backed up by more emergency generators. We manage our own servers, so if one really craps out without warning, I may have to work the next 24 hours to rebuild the software systems from scratch, but if there's a simple hardware failure, there's staff on duty 24 hours a day with an ample supply of repair parts to handle anything.

I have an emergency generator in our basement here, and more than one computer, but what if a drunk driver hits the wrong utility pole? I could go across town to a friend's house to manage my servers, but any computer in the house might be offline for several days.

I've been called an old fogey, a "senior technologist", for my conservative ways, and I readily admit that I'm constantly looking over my shoulder, as Satchel Paige recommended. As we age, we learn that it's not just important to look both ways before crossing a railroad track, but to keep an eye on the sky for watermelons falling out of airplanes. It only takes one to really ruin your day.

William Shakepeare was an entrepreneur in his own way, and in an era when authors had no copyright protection. Instead of creating intellectual properties and licensing them to others, he had to stage performances for audiences - and that may be one reason his works have survived the centuries. They appealed to the intellectuals of the time, but they were also lowbrow enough to keep the masses entertained.

If you look through Shakespeare's writings, you will find much wisdom for the entrepreneur. Was it original with Shakespeare? In many cases, no. Others were free to steal what he wrote, and he freely stole from others as well, but he stole from the best.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Shakespeare's insistance on integrity wasn't some namby-pamby do-gooder advice. It was pragmatic. If he disappointed those who attended his plays, he wouldn't have customers sending friends to him - and returning for his next play.

Similarly, when John Cash Penney opened his first store, he called it the Golden Rule Store. Later on, Penney had a reputation, but at the start, he wanted customers to know that he knew that his success depended on keeping customers happy.

Whether you call it the Golden Rule, or you call it integrity, taking proper care of customers is critical. That's the reason we got a toll-free telephone number several years ago.

I was scared that the toll-free number would be unaffordable. That has turned out not to be the case. Perhaps it's because many of our customers were, like me, raised in an era when calling long distance was almost a sin. Dad would drive 13 miles to the tractor dealership, to see if the parts he needed were in, rather than call long distance to ask. It was cheaper!

At this point, however, I try to encourage customers to use the toll-free line, not because it makes us look generous, but because we can often resolve something in 5 minutes on the phone that would otherwise take a manhour of time, sending multiple emails back and forth.

The problem with emails is that you ask a question, and it may be two days before you get an answer - and then you have to figure out what the question was, and why you asked it. A five-minute phone conversation lets us figure out what needs to be done, and often we can solve the problem while the customer is still on the phone. Even if we figure out time at minimum-wage rates, it's email, not toll-free phone calls, that now looks horribly expensive.

But it's the nuisance calls that are really useful. A customer called us several days ago to share some gossip. She was the one who explained to us that customers were rushing to us from another hosting company because they'd had so much downtime recently - and that the owner was displaying poor customer relations skills.

What's more, she revealed that he was moving his hosting operation from his residence to a data center some miles away. This had some customers concerned, because he had always boasted that his servers were especially secure because he had physical access to them.

He's got him a medal he won in the war
Weighs five hundred pounds and sleeps on his floor

It's as if a gay-bashing evangelical preacher were discovered to have a homosexual lover. It's an integrity problem. It's not the homosexual lover that's so much the problem, as it is the hypocrisy.

We're constantly casting about, trying to find new ways to do things, ways that are better for our customers, and ways that are more profitable for us, as well. One of the problems we face is that no matter how easy a Content Management System is to use once you know it, it can be difficult to get over that initial learning hump. The toll-free telephone line is a tremendous aid when customers are willing to use it - but how do we take care of the customers who won't?

The answer may be a wiki. Since CMSes change often, having documentation that can easily be updated is important. On the other hand, wikis are problematic. Some pages on Wikipedia, for instance, are great. Others are full of misinformation, and the content of those pages is fiercely guarded by those who like their misinformation. We want users able to correct errors in the documentation, and able to contribute tips, tricks, and traps, but we need to be careful about users introducing accidental errors - and vandals deliberately introducing errors.

The other thing is, it's a lot easier to use documentation if it's well-organized. We can't just create a wiki, call it "Building a Drupal Site" and expect it to grow into something valuable. We need to provide a good skeleton first, that can be fleshed out by users. That takes a lot of time - and we have to wonder, are we helping our customers, or will our efforts make it possible for users to get our great support, yet buy their hosting for a buck less at another hosting company?

We don't know - but we're working on it, anyway. It's all part of that "integrity" thing. It's possible that users, knowing that we are generous in giving assistance to non-customers, will turn to us for hosting, figuring that we will be helpful when they need specific help in a hurry. We can hope so. And if it doesn't work out that way, well, we can use the karma anyway.

Take a look at your business. If you're not walking the walk, the day will come when your customers find out. If you find you're in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. If Reverend Haggard had slowly moved from condemning homosexuality to frowning on homosexuality, to tolerating homosexuality, to approving homosexuality, to practicing homosexuality, he might have convinced his followers to stay with him - but giving them whiplash is always a bad move.

I've always been a strong supporter of copyright.

That isn't to say that copyright has always been a strong supporter of me. Scott's Discount Foods in Fort Wayne Indiana, before they sold out to SuperValu, once stole some copyrighted work of mine. I'd offered it to them for $300; they told me they didn't want it, but they used it anyway, and refused to pay me.

If you were to shoplift a $1 candy bar from Scott's, that's a Class D felony, and you can go to prison for a minimum of six months. The state bears all the cost of prosecution. However, when Scott's stole $300 worth of work from a writer, the federal prosecutor said that she didn't bother with prosecuting infringements of less than $10,000. It just wasn't worth her time, she said.

The alternative was to hire a lawyer and sue for damages. It'd cost me $5,000 to get started, perhaps another $5,000 to get to the finish line, and it might be ten years before I would see my $300. I quickly calculated $5,000 at 6% interest for 10 years to be $3,000.

So if someone tries to enforce their rights as the owner of intellectual property, I tend to root for them.

As a web host, I get notices every so often about copyright infringement. Under the DMCA, I'm free of liability if I wasn't aware of the infringement, and I take the image down right away.

Sometimes, the people are nice. One of our customers offers fonts for free download on her site. A couple of times, Jan has posted fonts that weren't public domain. I know she's done it accidently, because she can always tell me where it came from, and by gosh, she's right, it appeared to be public domain. The notes I get from fontographers are polite, always provide evidence that the fonts are theirs, and it's easily handled.

Other times, the takedown notices are fraudulent. In one case, a user showed me work in progress, asking for my assistance in prettifying things. I made suggestions, and they were adopted. A few months down the road, a virtual duplicate of the site existed elsewhere - and the owner of that site sent me a takedown notice. I knew in that case who was the original, and who was the copycat - but there are times when I have to search The Wayback Machine.

I got an email today about an image on SleepingLady's site. A stock photo agency asked for our help in contacting SleepingLady, because one of the images on her site supposedly infringed their client's copyright.

Now, there's a good reason they were unable to contact SleepingLady. She's been sleeping really well for about 2 years now. Her site had remained up, despite the fact that no hosting fees had been paid, as a memorial to her.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that the image was theirs. It's the same image as the one above (although this copy is smaller, and I defaced it deliberately in order to make sure I was legal under the "Fair Use" provisions of the copyright law.) I archived the site, just in case there were any legal questions arising at a later date, and yanked it from the server.

However, it's not an infringement of copyright if one has received permission to use the image - and they don't know SleepingLady's identity. If nobody has ever received permission to use the image, that suggests that the stock picture agency is doing a pretty poor job. On the other hand, if someone has been granted permission to use the image, then they were libeling SleepingLady by indicating to me, a third party, that she was a thief.
Even if Alaska Stock has never given permission to someone to use the image, they aren't the only ones marking this photographer's work. He has his own site, selling photography at Alaska Net.

Still another possibility exists, in that the permission might not have been given in a commercial transaction. SleepingLady lived in the same city as the photographer, although Alaska Stock didn't know that. They may have been close friends, or perhaps even relatives.

There's a lot of controversy right now over "digital rights management". That catchphrase means "copy protection". I'm against DRM because it's so often poorly done. Most people against DRM, however, simply want to steal.

That's not a new concept. Forty years ago, I was hearing about "the new morality" and preachers were complaining it was actually "the old immorality" Of course, the preachers were plagiarizing when they made that complaint, but hasn't it always been a "do as I say, not as I do" world?

Abbie Hoffman, a "yippie" who was tried as one of the "Chicago 7" who disrupted the Democratic National Convention in 1968, wrote a book called, Steal This Book in 1970. Many bookstores refused to carry it, because people followed the instructions, yet it became a best-seller anyway. (It had instructions on everything from growing marijuana to starting a pirate radio station to getting a free buffalo from the Department of the Interior.) Hoffman said, "It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List."

I'm not sure why you'd want a buffalo. You can't just accept delivery and turn him into a coat and some lunch. You basically have to turn him into a pet, and prove that you have enough land for him to graze. Still, some people will spend exorbitant amounts to get something free.

For a long time, I tried to figure out how to get even with Scott's, but I failed to come up with a good idea. For instance, I could have grabbed a $10 steak from the meat case, and hidden it behind some boxes of cereal. It'd be ruined before they ever found it, and it'd have the added bonus of smelling bad until then. On the other hand, it's quite possible that someone would find it and return it to the meat case, before it looked unappealing, but long after it became unwholesome to eat.

That wouldn't have taken long. Only Hill's Meat Market had worse meats. I bought a 10-pound package of hamburger from Hill's once, with the intent of using the baby scales to make 10 one-pound packages, and freezing 9 of them. Turns out that there was exactly 9 pounds in that 10-pound package. Yes, baby scales can be off - but I checked the weight of a 5-pound bag of flour, a 10-pound bag of sugar, and an 8.33-pound gallon of water. Smack-dab on. And then I cooked up the hamburger. It smelled old. Even the dog wouldn't eat it.

Mark Cuban, the billionarie technology entrepreneur who owns the Dallas Mavericks, raised a lot of eyebrows recently when he suggested people upload their personal porn collections to Google's YouTube. He was trying to make a point, asserting that Google has the ability to automatically block porn, and consequently could use that same technology to automatically block clips that infringe copyright.

It turns out that he was wrong. When people see porn, they report it, and it gets handled appropriately. (And YouTube does have porn, in a separate walled-off area.) Even Justice Potter, of the US Supreme Court, pointed out that it's hard to define porn, but "I know it when I see it". For copyrighted material, though, it's hard to tell.

I found the same picture above, of Mark Cuban, on several different websites. I drew the conclusion that it's an official picture of him, freely distributed for publicity purposes. The YouTube logo is from their website. While both images are copyrighted, neither is infringing, because permission to use publicity stills is implicit, and the YouTube logo falls under fair use. But how do you know whether I have permission to use the buffalo's image?

In fact I do have permission. That buffalo comes from the Bureau of Land Management's website. You can get into serious trouble if you infringe on the government's copyright on money or postage stamps, but most of the government's images are OK to use.

I tend to stick a lot of images on my blog posts. As a former newspaper editor, I learned that short paragraphs and lots of images make it easier to read matter. Being a cheapskate, I'm constantly on the look for appropriate images that are free to use, or ones that I already own - but if I need something, I don't hesitate to head for iStockPhoto, where I can get something for a buck.

It's not all that difficult to stay legal. It feels good to know that you aren't sponging off someone who can't afford it. The average full-time freelance writer in the US makes less than $5000 a year, and by the time you figure their expenses, most freelance photographers don't even break even. "Do not bind the mouth of the kine that tread the grain," we are warned. "The workman is worthy of his hire."

But there's nobody to defend SleepingLady's reputation. I don't know if she had that image legitimately, or if she just thought it was a pretty picture, and she wasn't harming anyone if she "borrowed" it.

It's not "Speak no ill of the dead" that bothers me, for although she is defenseless, there's no way Alaska Stock could have known that. It's that bit about bearing false witness. Asking someone to show that they have permission to use copyrighted material is fair. Accusing someone of infringement without knowing is just plain wrong.

Ketchup on his trousers cost Richard Phillips, a senior associate with the world's fifth largest law firm, his job. As they say, there are only four lawyer jokes; the rest are true stories.

On May 25, 2005, he dropped his secretary an email, Hi Jenny. I went to a dry cleaners at lunch and they said it would cost £4 to remove the ketchup stains. If you cd let me have the cash today, that wd be much appreciated.

Jenny Amner replied on June 3, With reference to the e-mail below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother's sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.

I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.

She wrote that she had told various partners, lawyers and trainees about his e-mail and they had offered to "do a collection" to raise the cash.

I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon.

Eventually, it made the news, including CNN - and it didn't stop there. The folks at Heinz volunteered that vinegar in water will get out ketchup stains - but they'd be happy to come up with the £4 (about $7.88) in order that Jenny should be able to enjoy the world's favorite ketchup, and there was another round of embarassing news stories.

He resigned in June.

Perhaps if we knew the details, we'd be sympathetic with Richard. I'm not the world's tidiest diner - "Can't take him anywhere", my wife claims - but I can't recall ever getting ketchup on someone else's britches unless there was gross misconduct - perhaps tossing a forward pass with a hot dog - on my part.

Furthermore, it isn't clear when Jenny's mother died. He sent his email on Wednesday. If she died on Monday, and Jenny was already gone on Tuesday, the email is far more offensive than if she died after the email was sent.

And it's not clear how they felt about money. My first mother-in-law, Beelzebub, would ask me to pick up something for her from a store 20 miles away, then insist on reimbursing me to the penny, $5.12, not $5.00 or $5.25, over my objections. The 40-mile round trip was more costly than the item purchased, not to mention the value of my time, but if she paid me exactly to the penny, then she didn't feel obligated.

I've always heard from people who weren't engaged in business, that you have to spend money to make money, as if spending money was profitable. That attitude will rapidly put you in the poorhouse. You have to save money to make money.

That doesn't mean you have to be a "stingy stinker", as Bloody Mary put it in "South Pacific". It means you need to get value for your money. Spending too much wastes a little money; spending too little wastes a lot. And that brings us to the story of Michael Dell.

Michael Dell returned Wednesday to the company named after him, formerly known as Dell Computer. He will be CEO, replacing Kevin Rollins who resigned. "We had great efforts, but not great results," Michael Dell wrote. "This is disappointing and it is unacceptable."

The company's top management is being trimmed drastically. There will be about a dozen reporting to Dell, compared to about twenty who reported to Rollins, including the COO. They are drastically revising bonuses as well.

Based on these facts, and these facts alone, it's proper to call Michael Dell an idiot. Perhaps those may be the right actions to take, but it's quite likely that they are wrong.

The fact that everyone seems to engage in this kind of cost-cutting when a company is in trouble doesn't make it the right thing to do. Michael Dell, moreover, has been cursed by being successful at a young age, and never having to deal with great adversity. You learn more about business in a year of great struggle than in a decade of great success - and you learn about turnarounds from both failing and succeeding in them. Dell might succeed - but it'll take a lot of luck

• If 20 brains aren't smart enough to keep Dell ahead of Hewlitt-Packard, are 12 brains going to do it? If so, would it make more sense to get rid of 7 more and let 5 brains do it? Would getting rid of all of them, and letting Michael Dell do it all would be the best strategy? If you have bad management, you need to replace it with good management. Getting rid of half of your managers and overwhelming the others with new responsibilities is exactly the wrong thing to do.
  
• If you are flailing about, losing market share, is that going to be resolved by cutting bonuses, reducing incentives to do well?

In 2004, Dell had 18.22% margins. In 2005, they had 18.32% margins. In 2006, they had 18.40% margins. In their latest quarter, it dropped to 17.04. You should expect margins to drop as the competition intensifies. In 2004, Dell had $41 billion in sales. In 2005, they had $39 billion. In 2006, they had just short of $56 billion in sales. Nothing there to be distressed about, either.

So what's the problem? It's all with the stock market. Earnings are fine, but investors believed hype, so they're disappointing. Dell is losing market share to Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple, but that's to be expected, too.

Lenovo is the old IBM line of computers. They've always been respected, but IBM wasn't managing the line well, so they sold it to Lenovo. It took a while to establish their credentials with corporate America, but now that they've done that, they're claiming the market share they deserve.

Hewlett-Packard was suffering, too, from the acquisition of Compaq, who had previously acquired Digital. When you acquire a bunch of new ducks, it takes a while to get them in a row. Carly Fiorina got fired because HP's board was impatient, and because, well, because Carly was an annoyance. Mark Hurd didn't really change much except the annoyance factor, and when Hewlitt-Packard started to hit on all eight cylinders, HP reclaimed the market share they deserve.

One cannot say Apple deserves the market share they currently have. They've increasingly been a company that lives on smoke and mirrors. It'd be safer to deal with a cellphone company, a televangelist, and a used car dealer, all three, rather than Apple - but Steve Jobs has been flogging his fanboys hard, and they're currently at a relative high. On this SuperBowl Sunday, we are reminded that a year prior to the introduction of the Mac, Apple was neck-and-neck with the PC in market share, and they threw that all away - but they've repeatedly tried very hard to go bankrupt and they're currently in one of their temporary revivals.

So I don't see much wrong with Dell. They had a problem - and not a small problem - with customer support a few years ago. They closed their support centers in North America, and relied on idiots in Asia. The problem wasn't that they were Asian. The problem was that they were idiots.

Much has been made of the fact that Dell is a just-in-time build-to-order computer manufacturer. When prices are falling, the fact that they only have 4 or 5 days of inventory on hand is a great plus. The key to Dell's success, however, hasn't been their low cost so much as their high value. If you can build cheap, but you have to sell cheap, you've gained little. Selling direct, they get retail dollars, not wholesale dollars, and they get those dollars mostly from people who can already go online, which is to say, the smart buyer.

If you can trust Dell to sell you a great computer and support it well, they can command top prices. If you get a bad computer from Dell - and there have been times that has happened - the fact that they support it well is a saving grace. In fact, if you are in trouble, and your supplier bails you out, you're especially likely to tell all your friends to buy from them.

But if you get lousy support, the fact that you're buying direct from the manufacturer is a definite problem. Everybody else can turn to the retailer when the manufacturer falls short. Dell customers cannot.

According to my sources, Dell's pretty well solved the problem with support. Perhaps it is enough that Michael Dell has taken control of the company. It will allay the fears of some investors. Dell should improve market share if they continue to rebuild their reputation for great support. Lenovo or HP or Apple is bound to have a misstep soon, which should improve Dell market share even more, at least temporarily.

Some of our servers are Dell DL 320s. If you look them up, you'll find that's trailing-edge technology - but that's fine with us. Serving web pages is not rocket science. Not only is trailing-edge technology proven and reliable, but you get more "bang for the buck"; we're able to give our users more for their money by using a lot of cheap servers rather than a few pricey ones. And frankly, we don't give a hoot whether they're Dell or not.

The point of this essay isn't whether Dell is a good company to invest in. We don't invest in Dell; we invest in ourselves. We think you should invest in yourself, too. It's not that Dell is a bad investment, and we make no allegation, either way. It's that you should avoid bad decisions in running your own business, by taking a look at the long term.

If you're not planning to sell your company in the next five years, you need to be careful to avoid short-term thinking. Bill Clinton learned that it's unwise to mess around with a young intern. Richard Phillips learned that it's unwise to mess around with a mature secretary. I don't know what my next mistake will be. I'm sure there will be one - but I'm going to try to head it off at the pass, by responding quickly and appropriately. Small mistakes, I can swallow. Big mistakes could swallow me.

With the SuperBowl this weekend, it's an approriate time to ask how well your advertising is working. According to the Concerned Scientists, companies are spending $620 billion each year on advertising.

Most of that is directed to bringing new customers in the door - but that door swings both ways. Customers don't just come, they go. Studies show that it's 5 times as profitable to spend money on customer retention than customer acquisition. Part of the reason is that advertisers are stupid, and they don't realize that it's a lot easier to make more sales to your existing customers, than to get new customers.

John Wanamaker founded the first department store in the US. According to legend, he hired an MBA who, after a few days, rushed up to Wanamaker with the startling revelation, "Half the money we're spending on advertising is wasted." Wanamaker was unperturbed. That's hardly news, he said. The question is which half?

Wanamaker admitted being stupid about the advertising he placed. Modern advertising agencies make no such admission. They engage in research to determine who sees the ads, and who remembers the ad - but still ad campaigns fail, and often fail miserably. After spending $929 million in taxpayer funds over 5 years, Drug Czar John Walters asked Congress for continued support for his office's National Youth Anti-Drug Media campaign - despite a report evaluating the campaign as a failure. It "isn't reducing drug use", Walters told the Wall Street Journal.

This is your ad budget.
This is your ad budget fried to flinders.
Any questions?

Advertising effectiveness is easier to measure online than in traditional media. When someone clicks on a link, the browser reports the referring URL. That may not be sufficient, however. When someone sees a banner advertisement for Quicken Loans, he may not click on the banner, but may visit the website later. Why? Because he is in a hurry at the moment, or because he wants to explore the site when he's in more private surroundings.

Additionally, there's a cumulative effect. Teenaged boys have a preference for one brand of beer over another, long before they taste beer for the first time. Auto companies discovered in the 1960s that advertising flashy red convertibles was more effective in drawing consumers into showrooms, even if they intended to buy a conservative sedan.

Still, there are things you can do to improve the effectiveness of your advertising - and improve your customer retention rate.

I've never read anywhere that effective advertising is a multi-step process. maybe this is a concept I invented. However, I figured this out in the 1970s, and it seems to be a good strategy.

In the 1970s, I was single - and I was frustrated trying to meet women in bars. It seemed like there were only two types of women there: ones who arrived with a boyfriend, and drunks. Instead, I started attending churches, figuring that the odds might be better there. They were, but that didn't make it an easy formula for meeting women.

Jerry Clower used to tell a story a story about performing in a church that turned out to be snake handlers. He got nervous, there in the front of the church, when they started passing around the rattlesnakes, so he leaned over and asked where the back door of the church was. Ain't none, was the answer. "Reckon where do they want one?" Jerry asked.

It wasn't quite that bad, but I definitely felt uncomfortable in some of those churches. Perhaps the better Clower story was the one where the hunter found himself in a tree, fighting with a coon. He yelled to his friend to shoot into the tree. "I can't do that," his friend said. "I might hit you!" The hunter yelled to shoot anyhow, because one way or the other, either he or the raccoon needed some relief.

When I had a newspaper, Betty started a craft shop in her garage. She advertised the name of her store for a few months, along with her address, and her hours of business. Finally, she ran an ad announcing "Everything in the store, 50% off this week".

A month later, I asked Betty how things were going, and she was glum. She paid about 50 cents of the dollar for her merchandise, she said, so when she sells for 50% off, she's selling at her wholesale cost, taking a loss on shipping, and on her other overhead costs. It'd have been worth it, she said, if she'd attracted a lot of new customers, but there were virtually none. Instead, she found that her regular customers stocked up - and after a week in which she was selling below costs, she'd had several weeks in which she had virtually no customers at all.

I talked with her a while, and she decided to offer offer DMC floss, not for 50% off, but for free, but just one color, and limited it to three per customer. When I checked back the next time, I found that she was exciting, because that offer had gotten many people to visit her shop, people who had never been there before, and some of them had started to buy from her regularly.

What's the difference? When she offered 50% off, people were skeptical. After all, many businesses put an uncompetitive prices on their goods in order to offer fictitious savings. Nobody is fooled - and in this case, nobody bit, even when it was very legitimate savings.

But "free" is something anyone should be able to understand. Betty's problem was getting crafters to sample her craft shop. Having sampled a number of bizarre churches, I could understand their reluctance to entering a strange store. You feel uncomfortable leaving without buying anything - perhaps not so uncomfortable as to create a new back door for the place, as Jerry Clower offered to do, but still uncomfortable.

JCPenney can succeed with a 50% off sale, because the bulk of their potential customers are familiar with JCPenney merchandise and pricing. Small businesses, however still need to make friends before they can make sales. This should be obvious to us all. You don't, after all, walk up to a stranger and say, "Hi, would you marry me?"

Even though few men do that, they still haven't figured out how to approach women. They think they need a "line". Lines are like slogans: they don't work. You need to open a conversation with someone you'd like to meet. The only really good "line" goes something like Hi, my name is ___ and I'd like to get to know you. Once you talk for a while, you may then have enough of a "foothold" to suggest adjourning to a nearby coffeeshop in order to continue the discussion in comfort, and from there, suggest further social activities.

Tinker to Evers to Chance. Stranger to Friend to Customer. It's not impossible to make an unassisted double-play, or even an unassisted triple-play in baseball, and it's not impossible to sell to a stranger. If you have a bunch of umbrellas on the street, with a sign indicating an attractive price, a sudden unexpected squall will produce a few sales. On the other hand, if you're there every day, and people have walked by you a hundred times, you'll probably sell more.

Online, it's cheaper. You don't have to give away merchandise to get people to visit your website. In fact, giving away merchandise may be exactly the wrong thing for you to do. Potential customers wonder what's up your sleeve, and if they can't find anything else, they figure it's identity theft.

I recently decided to give the Prize Patrol an opportunity to park in front of my house and deliver a 6-foot-long check to me. I went to the Publisher's Clearing House website. I just wanted to order a couple of magazines (and yes, I know that ordering magazines doesn't make me more likely to win) and get my name in the barrel. However, when I tried to complete the order, they kept asking more and more questions, and more and more windows kept popping up.

Hint: people don't like windows that pop up. That's one reason why Firefox and SeaMonkey became so popular so fast: tabbed browsing.

They don't like spam, either, which means they aren't eager to give you their email address. The solution isn't to ask them for anything. Instead, you offer them something - an RSS feed. Instead of you shoving newsletters down their throat, they can fetch your newsletterblog posts to their desktop.

And blog posts offer a wonderful way to make friends. For 35 years, the Shane Company has advertised "Now, you've got a friend in the diamond business" and while it's a so-so slogan, it's a very effective mission statement for your business. Why isn't it a good slogan? Because sloganeering doesn't make you a friend. Friends talk with, while slogans talk at you.

That's the other big difference between newsletters and blogs. It's hard to write back to a newsletter - but most blog software is designed to allow customers to kibitz.

Normally, I don't end my posts by exhorting readers to contact me and buy something. I figure that the blog indicates that I'm approachable, and the rest of the web page indicates that I offer hosting services. That's probably a mistake on my part. Among other things, those using an RSS reader don't get the rest of the web page.

They were talking today about John Edwards on the cable news channel. He's not interested in running as Vice-President this time around, they suggested, saying that his attack on Hillary Clinton's Iraq stance would keep him from being offered that position. (In case you missed it, he said, "If you're in Congress and you know this war is going in the wrong direction, it is no longer enough to study your options and keep your own counsel. Silence is betrayal. Speak out, and stop this escalation now. You have the power to prohibit the president from spending any money to escalate the war - use it.") Edwards' campaign is different in other ways as well. He's not promising lower taxes, as politicians always do, but telling people that the programs he proposes will mean paying higher taxes.

When someone asks you to sacrifice, when someone asks you to be better than you are, it's a compliment. It's telling you that someone thinks highly of you. It could work for Edwards. Goodness knows, I'm tired of politicians who talk about how great America is, and act as if it wasn't.

I think it was Dorothy Parker who told of retiring to her sleeper on a train when a man she'd met on the train, who had the upper, passed a note from his compartment to hers, with a proposition. I didn't know whether to honored by the offer, she said, or if she should correct his poor grammar and pass the note back.

My wife has an excellent set of knives; I won't be making any of those offers. On the other hand, in general, it's nice to be asked. If I can help you establish or promote your business, or if I might provide a hosting solution, I would be honored to assist. Please contact me at your convenience.

In every neighborhood, there's a location that's seen a half-dozen businesses in the last twenty years. A half-dozen people have reached the conclusion "Build it and they will come" but obviously, they were wrong. Perhaps they should have listened to the other two lessons from Shoeless Joe and the "Field of Dreams"

According to statistics, only about 10% of all businesses have the same name, are in the same place, and have the same ownership after five years. That doesn't mean 90% of them fail, but many of them do.

Many new businesses fail because they're retail operations. Retailing requires a rather large investment in inventory, yet the retailer is competing against many others that offer exactly the same product. Unless other stores pay substantially more at wholesale, or are a great distance away, it's hard to maintain satisfactory margins.

Manufacturing doesn't necessarily mean building a steel mill. The most popular new business to start is a restaurant. That's a manufacturing business, but it generally involves large staffs and are open long hours. Start a successful new restaurant, and before five years are over, you may be ready to sell out and cut back your work week to a mere 80 hours.

If a new business succeeds, it may need to expand to a larger location a block away. It may show so much promise that the owners invite in a new investor, who has plenty of capital to invest. The owner may have died, or the business sold due to a divorce. The company may have acquired weaker competitors and adopted their better-known brand, or may have merged, and adopted a name different than either one had been using.

Often enough a new business fails because it was a poor idea, or it was poorly executed. That certainly has happened often enough online. In the early days of the internet, virtually every word in the dictionary was claimed as a dot-com domain name. It turns out, though, that generic domain names were a big loser. Books.com went down the tubes, while amazon.com thrived. Auction.com went south, while ebay did well. Even x.com was parked, with paypal.com used as the primary site name.

This shouldn't have surprised anyone. In the 1980s, generics were a flash in the pan in the supermarket. Mom says she needs to buy toilet paper, but she tosses up a package of Northern in the shopping cart. Dad says he needs to buy beer, but he grabs a 12-pack of Corona. Why do they choose name brands over no-name commodities? Because they know the name brand will meet their expectations.

Ease his pain was what Ray Kinsella heard in the corn field, and it puzzled him. Ease whose pain? Ease his pain how? These are the same questions we need to ask. if we expect our products or services to sell.

Years ago, people left their film at little kiosks in parking lots, and picked up their pictures a day or two later. There were 4,000 Fotomat kiosks across the US in 1980, and other kiosks of other brands. Before film cameras were obsoleted, the kiosks made it easy to get film processed.

There are surely other pains a kiosk could ease. Find the right one, and you might do well for yourself. The only big drive-thru uses are banking and restaurants. The lightweight construction of a kiosk isn't particularly desirable if you're handling large amounts of cash, and preparing food in a small kiosk is impractical.

So why prepare the food in the kiosk? Instead, you could locate the kiosks on major routes into the central business district. People order a brown-bag lunch online by midnight, and pick up their lunch on the way to work, between 6 AM and 10 AM. Require the customer to pay online as well, and it would speed up delivery.

The brown bag lunch could include fresh greens, unlike a frozen meal, could be a nice meal, unlike the salty, greasy sandwich-shop offerings, could be much less expensive than eating at a nice restaurant, and would be much less hassle than packing your own lunch.

Would brown-bag kiosks attract enough business to be an attractive business? I don't know; I don't know of anyone that has tried this idea. It certainly has interesting potential, though.

You'd prepare the food in a central commissary in the middle of the night. Most restaurants don't use their kitchen between midnight and 4 AM, and you could get a bargain there. You would haul the meals to the kiosks between 4 AM and 6 AM, then go home to sleep. Each kiosk's operator would arrive at 6 AM, work until 10 AM, and have the rest of the day free.

Go the distance was the other lesson for Ray Kinsella. Setting up a business like this would require one to solve some problems.

One would be the proper menu. That's always a problem for food service businesses. If you offer the same foods as a Burger King or Wendy's offers, your cold food won't compete with their hot foods. If you offer the same simple foods as a convenience store, they might as well fill up the tank and grab a newspaper while they are at it. With other foods, you might find people are less interested in your offerings. You may even need to vary the menu from day to day, in order to sustain interest.

Another problem will be keeping things square with the user. If customer orders are tracked by name, there are privacy concerns. If orders are tracked by number, there will be customers where husband and wife present the same receipt, minutes apart, instead of each presenting different receipts. The first will get a meal, the second will not, and there will be a meal left over at the end of the day. Oops!

That's not to say that the problems are without solution. That's not even to suggest that the problems are particularly difficult to deal with. It's no more difficult than dry cleaners or shoe repair shops keeping track of customer orders, for instance. But you will have to go the distance and not give up at the first sign of difficulty.

It's pretty obvious, given the assaults on Social Security, that we can't count on it existing until we're 100. It's also pretty obvious that the days of working for the big corporation until we reach 65, and then retiring on a good pension, are over. We need to prepare for our future - and unless we're self-employed, we're at the whim of every breeze that comes along.

You need to ease their pain. You need to go the distance. But you also need to build it, for while there's no assurance that they will come if you do, it's pretty obvious that if you don't build it, there's no place for them to come.

Business cycles. That is, business does cycle.

A lunch counter experiences three cycles a day - breakfast, lunch and supper. Snowblowers have an annual cycle. The product cycle on pet rocks was months. Ketchup was king was over a century before salsa came along to be the most popular condiment. And then there's the biggie - the economy, which cycles between boom and bust with an uncertain time period.

When times are good for a particular product, most of the producers seek to offer a "good value" proposition. It's better quality than the cheapest, less expensive than the best. That looks like it should be the "sweet spot", what people should want to buy, and what you should want to sell. It's not.

If you're resistant to that notion, you're not alone. I try to follow The Law of Wine. I look for the cheapest brand in the category I'm buying, add 20-25% to the price, and that's the price of the wine I buy. I figure I can't taste much difference between a $12 wine and a $1200 wine, but there's going to be a difference between the cheapest wine, and one a little better, that anyone can taste.

But I've been paying attention to the "best or cheapest" law for nearly two decades. It seems to work without exception. In a downturn, the people who can afford the best can still afford the best. Those who can't, will tend to buy the cheapest stuff they can find.

That doesn't mean you can't find customers - and good profits - in the middle. In good times, there's plenty to go around for everyone. It's just that when push comes to shove, you're the one that will be pushed off the cliff, the one that will be shoved under the wheels of the bus. People have to do what they can afford to do.

A bigger fool may come along, just when you need to exit a "middle" business. You can tell him that you're just tired of the XYZ business, you need a vacation, and when your vacation is over, you want to try this other business instead. If he asks about the impending down cycle, you can truthfully tell him that, hey, all business is cyclical.

And tell him business is like sex. When it's good, it's great. When it's bad, it's not bad. Don't tell him that he's going to lose his keister. Be on the lookout for a downturn, and sell out at the first sign, before prices drop. And whatever you do, don't take back a note. Insist on cashing out. Tell him that you can't relax on a vacation if you're worrying about whether you're going to get paid. Tell him that there are no guarantees in business, and business isn't like having a treasury note, where you can just clip coupons; you have to make it work.

Or if you're not up to saddling someone with a bad investment, eliminate the need: aim to become the best or the cheapest.

It's hard to be best. It's not always clear what is the best. In computer operating systems, there are three major options - Windows, Apple, and Linux.

It'd be easy to argue that Apple is best. With annual upgrades costing $129, it's certainly the most expensive. On the other hand, it doesn't run Active-X controls. South Korea users opt for Windows 99% of the time because they need Active-X to access banking sites, government sites, e-commerce sites.

It'd also be easy to argue that Linux is cheapest; it's free. But if you already know how to do most things in Windows, switching to Linux may involve taking a course at a community college - expensive in time, even if the course were free. And your friends can help you with most Windows problems; they don't know Linux. For many people, Windows is cheaper than Linux.

I would argue as a server owner, that Linux is better than Windows, because it is more secure, and because I need fewer servers to handle the same number of websites. What's more, it's a lot easier to find websites scripts that run on Linux servers than it would be if I converted to Windows. If both operating systems were free, I'd choose Linux for my servers.

If Linux is best what's Apple? Well, maybe there are two bests - one for desktop, and one for servers. Or maybe Apple's not best. The company has skated close to bankruptcy several times, and now they're even dropping the "Computer" part of their name. It seems that they're neither cheapest nor best.

So which is it to be? Should you be cheapest, or should you be best? Neither one is easy.

One in every six millionaires in the US is a millionaire. I think this is partly a consequence of what I call Ben Franklin Law. This law wasn't named for the founding father, but for the dime store.

When I was in high school, I worked at the local Ben Franklin store, getting $1.25 an hour. One of my friends, John, worked at the bowling alley, earning 65c an hour. Another one, Steve, was a carryout boy at the local supermarket, earning $2.00 an hour. It's easy to see why. Bowling is fun. Everybody wanted to work there. Carryout boys have to lug heavy groceries, and in the winter, they had to keep going out into the snow and ice.

Except that's not how it really worked. John wasn't bowling when he worked. He was stuck in the back, working on greasy equipment, in really noisy surroundings. Steve, meanwhile, usually pushed out the groceries in a cart, instead of carrying them, often in pretty nice weather. He spent most of his time bagging and flirting with every girl who came through the checkout line with - or without - her mother.

You don't get paid for what you do, according to Ben Franklin's Law. You get paid for what it's perceived that you put up with.

And it works in other places as well. A tax preparer and a travel agent do the same work. They interview people, and fill out forms according to complex rules. If anything, the travel agent's job is harder, because the rules change from day to day, while tax rules only change once a year.

Paying taxes is unpleasant, so the tax preparer's job is considered undesirable. Going on vacation is nice, so travel agency seems like a fun work. For doing the same work, a well-established one-man tax preparation firm will make more before May 1 than a well-established one-man travel agency will earn through the entire year.

Ironing clothes is hot work and "perc" is smelly. Nobody wants to do laundry, yet everybody wants to look nice. What's more, many people need to wear dry-clean-only clothes in order to work. With a lot of demand and minimal competition, that makes dry cleaning a fairly good business to be in.

It costs quite a bit to start up a dry cleaning business. You can start a lunchroom in an urban location for less than $20,000, but it costs about $200,000 to start a stand-alone dry cleaning store. That's a big enough "nut" to scare off many people from entering the business.

What's interesting, though, is the ability to expand. Once you have a central plant, you can open a satellite store. The satellite store doesn't require much - a counter, a cash register, some racks to hold clean clothes, and some bins for incoming dirty clothes. You also need a truck to haul the dirty clothes to your central plant, and to haul the clean clothes back. That satellite store can doubles your volume, with virtually no additional investment.

You realize, of course, that it's not quite this simple. People fail in the dry cleaning business, the same as in any other business. It takes hard work and a smart manager to succeed in any business.

But part of being a smart manager is choosing the right business in the first place. The dry cleaner zigs when everyone else zags. A restaurant involves hot work as well, and you have the odor of hot grease instead of the odor of "perc", but while a restauranteur competes with every housewife with a frying pan, a dry-cleaner is behind an investment wall that limits his competition.

You can stack the deck in your favor - or you can set yourself up for a fall. You need to be best, or cheapest in your product category - and if you choose a business that discourages competition, you'll be that much better off. Choose your business well.

James W. Marshall discovered gold on the property of Johann August Sutter near Coloma, California, on January 24, 1848. A builder, Marshall was overseeing construction of a sawmill on the American River for General Sutter.

"Just when we had got partly to work…Mr. Marshall with his old wool hat in hand…exclaimed, 'Boys, I have got her now,'" James S. Brown recalled:

I…jumped from the pit and stepped to him, and on looking in his hat discovered say ten or twelve pieces of small scales of what proved to be gold. I picked up the largest piece, worth about fifty cents, and tested it with my teeth, and as it did not give, I held it aloft and exclaimed, "gold, boys, gold!" At that they all dropped their tools and gathered around.

What most people don't realize is that General Sutter was bankrupted by the gold rush that ensued. He had been forced to flee his creditors in Switzerland in 1833, at the age of 30. Ten years later, in California, he was the ruler of the Sacramento Valley, founder of Neuve Helvetia, a small sovereign. After the discovery of gold on his land he lost everything. Gold was his ruin. He never recovered from the loss of his property.

He's buried here in Lancaster County, just down the road a piece, in Lititz. I went out to his grave last year, and talked to him. He didn't have much to say in return.

That's a long way to fall. After 1833, he drifted through New York, Oregon, Vancouver, and Hawaii, ending up in California - El Dorado! - in 1839. Within a few days of arriving, he presented Governor Alvarado with a bold plan for founding a colony in the unexplored north, on the southern bank of the American River, where it joins with the Sacramento River. The governor granted him a large tract, where he planted orchards and vineyards, planted grain, and began extensive irrigation projects. In 1841, the governor visited Neuve Helvetio - Spanish for "New Switzerland" - and gave him citizenship. The success of his enterprise was phenomenal. Sutter was the richest and most respected of all Californios.

Who says there are no second acts? But there may be no third acts. Thousands overran his lands, destroying fields, harvest, and buildings. "Even my millstones were stolen", he later told Bancroft. Trying to protect his property wasn't just hopeless; it was dangerous. He fled.

In many ways, the internet is a gold rush as well. It's not the only modern gold rush, though.

In 1948, Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin founded the Wham-O company, manufacturing a slingshot for falconry. No, they weren't trying to kill the falcons by shooting at them; they were slinging meat in the air to the falcons. Falconry being a niche interest, they had limited success.

A decade later, though, they trademarked the name Hula-Hoop and were able to sell 25 million of the $1.98 circles of Marlex within four months. It nearly bankrupted them. They kept making bigger and bigger batches of Hula Hoops to meet demand - but by the time the weather turned cold, the fad had died. The market collapsed, leaving them with a huge inventory of unsold Hula Hoops and a big pile of bills. Wham-O only survived by exporting their huge stocks to other countries.

Bowmar, of Fort Wayne, invented the hand-held calculator in 1971. The hand-held four-function "Bowmar Brain" sold for about $250 - and was a rip-roaring success. Bowmar was an LED display manufacturer, and turned to Texas Instruments to manufacture their logic chip. They borrowed heavily to ramp up production to meet demand - and ended up in bankruptcy when prices fell rapidly. The company survived - they merged with Electronic Designs to form White Electronic Designs - but only when they won a lawsuit against Texas Instruments.

Royal Crown Cola created the diet cola gold rush with Diet Rite Cola. It's invisible now. Reynolds International Pen started the ball pen gold rush. I'm not sure they even exist any more. Osborne started the gold rush for portable computers. When Adam Osborne died, he had become an obscure figure.

Forrest Gump was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest. The movie treats him as a joke, a General who lost a war, the founder of the KKK, but to military historians, Forrest was the most innovative and successful general in the American Civil War. Paramount in his strategy was to "get there fustest with the mostest", even if it meant pushing his horses at a killing pace, which he did more than once.

That was the strategy of many internet companies in the 1990s. Get Big Fast was the idea, and worry about how you were going to make your money once you owned the market. Amazon was named for the world's largest river, and the strategy worked for them. Netscape was originally named Mozilla, because they intended to be the 600-pound gorilla who conquered Mosaic, the original graphic web browser. Where does a 600-pound gorilla sleep, goes the joke. Anywhere he wants to!

The problem, though, is that a 600-pound gorilla has a big appetite. If you owe the bank a large amount that you don't have, you don't sleep well. If you owe the bank an immense ammount that you don't have, the banker doesn't sleep well.

The second internet gold rush is on, right now. It's based on "social networking". With flagging viewer numbers and viewers TiVOing through ads, advertisers were reluctant to spend money on television, and some of that money went to sites like MySpace, and Facebook, but the number of sites has ballooned, and the number of ad dollars has not. All of a sudden, websites are starting to shutter their doors.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of companies that made money online right through the first "dot-bomb" collapse, and they will continue to make money right through this one.

You can't lose money that's not at risk. This seems so fundamental, that it's hard to believe anyone over the age of 12 misses it, but there's apparently only so much blood in the human body, and when people smell profits, all the blood rushes to the nose, and there's none left for the brain.

So if you're not getting yourself out on a limb, and sawing it off, what is the key? You need to rake it in faster than you are spending it, and do that without selling off your assets.

That's not the only way to succeed, of course. If you plant walnut trees for a harvest of veneer, it may be 60 or 80 years before the crop is ready, and during those decades, those trees need to be cared for, and taxes need to be paid on the land. According to my back-of-an-envelope calculations, a veneer farm should be rather profitable. The problem is that if you're 40 when you plant the trees, you'll need to borrow heavily to get started, and you'll be dead before the trees are ready to harvest. You can buy a grove that's already established and bring it to harvest, or you can plan on selling your appreciated grove, and letting someone else nurse the crop the rest of the way.

So offer something people will pay for. It can be a product. It can be a service you perform. It can be a service your site performs.

I visit a site regularly called istockphoto. They've got a wonderful business. I can get a royalty-free image there for a buck. Great quality images, and I don't have to worry about someone claiming I'm violating copyright, as is likely to happen if I steal images, using Google's image search.

I've known many who've tried to make money from their photography. They sell framed artwork at flea markets, in restaurants, in gift shops. The problem is, they spend $12 on a frame, $5 on photolab, and they have a 50/50 chance, at best, of selling it within a year. If they get $40, and the retailer gets half that money, that's not very profitable.

They can do better producing a calendar. It costs them $1,000 to produce 1000 calendars, and since $8 is a lot cheaper than $40, they sell 400 of them. The retailer gets half that $3,200, so they get $1,600 for their images. But the market for calendars is pretty competitive, and they might only sell 20 of them. That's a $920 loss.

Those photographers can upload their photos to istockphoto, though. There's no investment in frames or lab costs, or in printing calendars that quickly lose value once the year is over. If they sell 20 copies of an image, that's only $20 income, and part of it goes to the site - but that's substantially better than the obvious alternatives.

The photographer is happy, I'm happy, and I hope the folks at istockphoto are happy as well. They had to solve some basic problems to make it work. For instance, it costs almost $1 to collect $1. They sell me 10 pictures for $10 instead, which greatly increases their income. It'd be even more profitable to sell me 50 pictures for $50, but I probably wouldn't have gone for that deal initially.

Some of my hosting customers are musicians. They offer downloads of their music. The going rate, at iTunes and others, is $1. The average customer, though might not want 10 songs by the same unknown artist. Their answer? They give away the downloads for free. They make their money by performing at wedding receptions, at festivals, etc., and they view the downloads as advertising for their live performances.

"Hey, that's catchy music you're playing. Who is that?"

"That's the group that I heard at the festival last week. They're great aren't they?"

"You bet. Hey, I wonder how expensive they are. We need entertainment for the office picnic this summer."

"Never doubt," Margaret Mead said, "that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Before the industrial revolution, few people had jobs. They were craftsmen, artisans, farmers, or merchants, self-employed in their life's work. Usually, they worked in their homes. As a result of being around all day, fathers played a bigger role in their children