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The entire future of a company or industry can hinge on one little deal. The $50,000 IBM paid to license Windows was the foundation for Microsoft and the technology industry for the last couple of decades. Apple's licensing contract with Portal Player to create the iPod was nearly as big -- and certainly huge for that company. The sale of 3Par could also be one of those pivotal deals, as huge firms like HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, Cisco and EMC position themselves around the new "cloud" opportunity.

Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source vs. proprietary software. "In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant," Matt Asay recently wrote at GigaOm. Tim O'Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008, when he said that "Architecture trumps licensing any time."

This week, Apple is expected to announce a refresh of several iPod products (including the touch) and possibly the Apple TV. The real drama remains with its higher-profile offerings -- the iPhone and iPad -- and last week, Qualcomm gave a credible look at their compelling future. However, with phones running on Google's Android platform passing the iPhone in shipments, there is some doubt whether Apple can hold onto this lead, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 product is starting to pull some positive comments. What is fascinating is that this battle is increasingly defined by false information.

Last week, Dell cranked its wallet wide open and announced its intention to buy up a company called "3Par" for $1.15 billion. Putting 3Par under the Dell umbrella would buff up the high-end storage and large-scale backup side of its business and give companies like IBM and HP a new competitor to worry about. The purchase looked similar to a deal it cut in 2008, when it forked over $1.4 billion for EqualLogic, as well as its Ocarina Networks buy just last month, though the terms of that one were left undisclosed.

I just finished both reading The Big Lie, a fabulous book if you are into board room dynamics and disasters, and doing massive coverage on the HP Mark Hurd scandal. It is, however, a little unnerving to see some of the most powerful people in the world behave worse than six-year-olds. My own management training forces a process that focuses on the cause for problems rather than the people to blame for them. I still think this to be a better method and one of the only ways to avoid repeating stupid mistakes.

Facebook already knows what you like, who your friends are, what you're thinking right now, so what the hell does it matter that it knows where you are too, right? The king of social networks has finally revealed its much-anticipated location-awareness features. Facebook Places will let users with Facebook apps on their mobile devices "check in" at various locations to let their friends know they've arrived. It sounds very similar to existing networks like FourSquare and Gowalla, except for the small detail that Places is backed by a network with more than half a billion members.

Once again this week, users of the enormous social networking service Facebook have fallen prey to unscrupulous people scamming them for information and money. It's beginning to be a familiar story: A seemingly innocuous link is sent from a friend, a company asks for personal information, and mysterious charges show up on a credit card -- or, in this case, a mobile phone bill. Internet security experts, and Facebook itself, would have us rely on that old adage, "there's a sucker born every day," as we shake our heads and joke about how ignorant people will fall for anything.

I spent last week on Mark Hurd's firing, er involuntary resignation, and watched the backstory develop, and it isn't pretty. Hurd was likely the third-hardest guy to fire in Silicon Valley behind Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison -- and yet, at least initially, he seemed to be fired as a result of a false accusation of sexual harassment leading to a global WTF moment. Ellison, the next guy up on that invulnerability list, wrote a flaming letter to The New York Times and inadvertently seemed to remind folks that with Hurd gone, both he and Steve Jobs could be vulnerable.

When reports surfaced last week that Verizon and Google were privately working out a deal that more or less flew in the face of what we thought was Google's stance on Net neutrality, the company was eager to issue denials. At least, it denied that things were playing out exactly as they'd been reported in The New York Times. It turns out that Google was in fact hammering out an agreement with Verizon, an ISP that's mostly maintained the service provider party line when it comes to Net neutrality: Let us manage our networks the way we choose.

Last week, there was uproar about a rumored secret negotiation between Google and Verizon that, if successful, would result in Google customers getting better bandwidth. At the core of this controversy are three things: a lack of adequate action by the sitting administration; a lack of consistent definition of the concept of "Net neutrality," and the communistic nature of the definition that appears to underlie this outrage. This core concept of "equal to all" is fundamentally flawed and should be objectionable under the capitalistic model that currently maintains the U.S.