New York Times columnist David Brooks' take on the proposed auto industry bailout is exactly correct. President-Elect Obama should pay careful attention to Brooks' points and turn his back on the incredibly powerful lobbies that represent its constituencies. It's time to let the U.S. auto industry fail into bankruptcy, use the bailout money to cushion the blow for the displaced workers, and rebuild the industry on a more sound basis.

As Brooks puts it, "In short, a bailout will not solve anything — just postpone things. If this goes through, Big Three executives will make decisions knowing that whatever happens, Uncle Sam will bail them out...." These folks have ignored the market for decades. They've come to view innovation as threatening, competition as stifling and responsible planning as an anachronism.

One of my colleagues suggested the other day that if the Big Three went into bankruptcy, many if not most of their assets would be purchased by Japanese and other international auto makers interested in having U.S. production facilities and workers to shorten their plant-to-customer links. Who gets hurt? Those people who should pay the price: auto executives and shareholders, the former for not making good business judgments even when the facts were staring them in the face and the latter for failing to hold their employees accountable for stupidity.

I grew up in Michigan. I know how devastating a shutdown of the Big Three will be. I have friends there who will be displaced, injured economically. Being pro-labor, I'm not excited about the impact on unions either. But the time has come to bite the bullet as we did earlier for the steel industry and other major industry segments that refused to adapt to changing times and calcified. It's a process Brooks calls "creative destruction" and it's become an integral part of American capitalism.

Time to let that destruction take its course. It would take a powerful leader to face down those special interests who will scream bloody murder if a bailout is denied. This will be a good test of President-Elect Obama's intestinal fortitude.

I just posted a note on my spiritual blog on Gaia.com about the connections and differences between success and significance. This is important stuff for my life. Maybe you'll find it helpful or useful as well.

One of my favorite newsletters is Mark Hurst's Good Experience. I met Mark back in the days when I was at CNET and I've admired his work on user experience design across the broad spectrum of media over the years. His is one of the few newsletters I read from top to bottom as soon as I can after it arrives.

This week, his newsletter is about JetBlue, an airline that worked hard to build a rep for exceptional customer service and has now squandered it away. Mark talks about how in its early days, the company developed a genuine buzz among travelers but points out that, "Customer experience isn't a one-time thing. It requires constant, constant, constant focus on the basics. A slick ad campaign counts for next to nothing, unless it describes the benefits of the customer experience. And it may even be harmful, if it diverts resources away from the customer experience."

How many times have you visited a new restaurant in your town, been imprssed by the quality of the food and service, recommended it to friends, made it a regular stop, and then watched over the next few months as it went steadily downhill? It's almost as if these businesses think that they can rest on the laurels of a reputation once it's earned. But there are always new restaurants opening, new levels of expectation being set, and new channels through which customers can communicate their feelings and recommendations.

AOL has announced it will no longer support Netscape as of Feb. 1. In one of the longest and least surprising death spirals in an industry heavy laden with such sagas, the Netscape browser succumbed to competition from other Web browsers.

While Microsoft, with its anti-competitive foray into the browser market with its first free Internet Explorer product in the mid 90's, is the prime mover in the Netscape browsers' demise, Netscape's own bold adventure in Open Source also gets part of the blame/credit. Under intense economic pressure and public focus, Netscape created the open source Mozilla project so it could also provide a free browser to compete with IE. Mozilla has become wildly successful and in point of fact, Netscape's browser of late has been nothing more than a very slight repackaging of Mozilla.

While I do not mourn the loss of the browser, I worry a bit at the message underlying this whole ugly process. Netscape was founded by Marc Andreessen and friends. That team took a project dubbed Mosaic out of the UIUC Supercomputing Center and parlayed it into a company that zoomed to a multi-billion-dollar dominant player in the Web browser space. If Microsoft had not (illegally as was later determined by the courts) eaten Netscape's lunch by poisoning the entire space of Web browsers with its free and vastly inferior (but bundled) IE product, we might well be looking at a Netscape that would be as big as Google and Microsoft today.

Companies with technologies that appear to be good candidates for open source development and treatment will undoubtedly continue to cast a jaundiced eye on that possibility after studying the Netscape anti-phenomenon. And in the long run that could turn out to be bad for everyone concerned.

UPDATE

Today's (Monday, 12/17) newspapers carried a story out of LA that said, "Dozens of striking writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up new companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers directly with video entertainment on the Web."

I'm finding myself increasingly intrigued by and sucked into the so-called "Digital Convergence" technology trend. Not that the trend is new but it seems to me to be gathering steam on a lot of different fronts, prodded by a number of different initiatives.

One current development I think could have a tremendous impact on the acceleration of the video-over-Internet as a replacement (in some part at least) for broadcast TV is the current writers' strike. The media companies that are resisting paying the deserving writers anything for their contribution to the success of the digital distribution of their wares may find themselves looking at the rear end of a rapidly vanishing bus if they keep up their greedy ways.

I can envision a number of new Internetworks coming together and hiring these writers to produce original content for which they are handsomely rewarded. Then, when the broadcast TV industry finally comes to its senses and does the right thing by the writers, the latter won't really care to work for the slave wages and under the exploitative conditions they have been content with for far too long.

I'm surprised, as I reflect on it, that Net video hasn't already supplanted even more of broadcast TV, given its tremendous advantages:

• Everything is or can be on demand.
• Length of shows is content-driven rather than time-slot driven.
• Interactivity comes along almost for free.
• The ability to create successful narrow vertical networks that build around and enhance community is almost unfettered.
• "Subscription" models can guarantee revenue levels.

I'm sure I'm overlooking dozens more. This is a space that is set to explode in the next six months and if the writers' strike continues, I think it accelerates the process enormously.

Have you seen the new TV ads from Ask.com? (They might not actually be new. Since I use Tivo for all my broadcast TV, I don't generally see any commercials.) The one I saw asked, "Why does search have to look like this?" while showing the Google basic search screen (but not even honestly; see below) "when it could look like this", then showing a series of three different backgrounds on search request pages but not a single results page.

That has to be the most ineffective ad campaign I've ever seen. I mean, it makes the assumption that people would rather have their search requests entered on pages with cute pictures and lovely backgrounds than on plain white backgrounds. I doubt there are 20 people in the United States who give a crap about that. What they want is search that finds what they're looking for.

BTW, if Ask.com is going to continue this campaign, they ought to be honest about it. The default Google search page is not just a search box and a prompt and a button. It always has some minimalist graphics on it, some of which can be awfully cute and even attractive.

But seriously, folks. If the only way you can find to differentiate yourselves from the leader in your sector is by pretty pictures, maybe it's time you give up and go play in traffic.

Congress is apparently looking into the question of whether Apple's exclusive five-year iPhone deal with AT&T breaks the law. Not being a licensed lawyer, I can't offer a legal opinion, but I can tell you this: it's one of the reasons I think the iPhone may turn out to be less successful than Apple wishes or plans.

There are a lot of places in the UnIted States where AT&T's cell phone coverage sucks. Tying the iPhone to any single carrier seems both unwise and unmindful of customer needs and interests. Tying it to AT&T is really dumb. Not only is Apple's new partner a morally bankrupt company in many ways, its Edge Internet service is a joke and its arrogance knows no bounds. Well, in that last respect, at least it's akin to Apple.

I hope Congress or the FTC or the FCC or some other alphabet-soup agency puts the kibosh on this exclusive deal so that if and when I do decide I'd like an iPhone, choice of carrier won't be the final obstacle.

Strange confluence of events coming across my desk today. I have received emails or read blog posts about the following today:

• The National Football League has told news and sports Web site publishers that they may not publish more than 45 seconds of video footage shot at a team's facility if that footage involves anyone other than the standup reporter. They're afraid such video will interfere with their property rights and cut into their glutted revenue stream. What crap. (Details)
• Major League Baseball teams have been barring fans from carrying banners into the stands that they consider "in poor taste." They've been doing this for a while, but their sense of "poor taste" has taken a strange turn against sloganeering about Barry Bonds. WTF? (Details)
• High-tech PR firms are cracking down on programmers and other non-execs showing up on Web video interviews and blogs without the firms' permission. Which they never give, by the way. One wag was apparently fired for appearing on Robert Scoble's "ScobleShow"! (Details)

I can't help wondering if the Bush-Cheney Regime's policy of Government-in-the-Dark isn't contagious. We have lived through an era of the greatest reduction in individual liberties and freedoms in our nation's history. I hope we are nearing its end with the forced exit in a few hundred more long, tedious days of an administration that has absolutely zero respect for anyone outside their increasingly tightening inner circle.

(Thanks to Tony Seton for the pointage on the first two items above. And, Robert, if you read this, great shot of you on the front page of the Merc on Saturday. You looked genuinely excited about getting your iPhone!)

I had a problem this morning with my Salon.com subscription renewal. Like a dutiful person, I emailed their support team with the information on the error page I got.

A bit later, I got a nice email from them telling me they'd received my request and would normally answer within two business days. TWO DAYS!!!!! In an era of email and Web support automation via autoresponders, that's just silly.

It reminded me of the early days of Mac development when you'd send Apple's developer support an urgent email about a bug that was holding up your project and you'd get an email back telling you how many more DAYS it would be before you'd hear back from them. Yeesh. My team dropped its membership in Dev Support and struck out on its own to find help from other developers.

Don't get me wrong. This Salon.com problem isn't urgent. Nobody's being "held up" by their delay. I just find it amusing that one of the first Web sites with any widespread audience (I know; I was the first Webmaster there) can't, more than 10 years later, deal with a simple 404 error in less than two days.

Yeesh.

Reports today that Dell, having fallen slightly short of expectations for current quarter earnings, will lay off 8,000 workers rankled me. But they also got me thinking about the broader issue of equitable treatment of leadership and rank-and-file.

Across the United States, top executive compensation is out of control. The average CxO makes between $400 and $500 for every dollar paid to the average worker, an all-time high for that gap ratio. In 2005, the figure was $411. Final figures for 2006 are apparently not in yet, but estimates set the ratio above $500.

That is criminally irresponsible. Exec pay is growing faster than corporate profits while rank-and-file compensation barely keeps up with inflation.

So I have a modest proposal. Whenever a company sees a need to trim its budget and lay off workers, the top tiers of executives must share equally in the reduction as a group. For example, if the company wants to shave $100 million off operating costs and to do so it plans to lay off 10,000 workers (just hypothetical numbers for easy calciulation), then it should be required to reduce the layoff by half to 5,000 and take the remaining $50 million out of pay cuts and/or terminations to the top tiers of executives.

(Read more for my reasons and explanation.)