Brian White
Oklahoma City, OK - http://

Brian White is a strong advocate of value investing and index funds, but has known to hold an equity or two from time to time. Financially speaking, he's covered the Fortune 500 for six years in various reporting and writing positions and currently owns a business consulting company. Additionally, Mr. White holds BA and MBA degrees.

When Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) released a $50/month "unlimited everything" plan with its Boost Mobile prepaid unit back at the start of the year, it never knew what firestorm it would eventually set off. Indeed, that move caused a huge spike in Q1 subscribers to Sprint, with a number north of 700,000 -- and it caused the prepaid wireless competition to start offering low monthly costs for unlimited talktime plans (often with unlimited use of other features).

Tracfone, the largest prepaid service in the U.S., has finally fallen into place. The prepaid reseller's "Straight Talk" pan will cost $45 per month for unlimited talktime, further making comparisons of prepaid and post-paid wireless easy for many cash-strapped consumers. With post-paid wireless plans costing $99 and up for unlimited talk, prepaid plans for half the cost are soaring during the recession.

Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) has been in deep trouble for a while now. For some untold reason, the company placed almost all its growth bets on its wireless division but has not produced a hit handset in years. Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Samsung Electronics have been producing and selling all kinds of cutting-edge wireless handsets to carriers all over the world. What has Motorola been up to?

It's still producing handsets, but so many of the designs and marketing strategies have been commodities lately. Meanwhile, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has taken the mobile crown with the iPhone, and even Palm Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) has risen from the dead with the new Palm Pre. Motorola was in such bad shape financially that it even suspended the spinoff of its mobile unit last year.

Retailing behemoth Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) won't be aggressively rolling in health clinics into its retail stores in 2009, as it has scaled back its plan to 31 locations with clinics from the original estimate of about 400 stores in 2009. Wal-Mart even had as many as 77 locations with in-store clinics in 2008, so it has drastically rolled back its plans here. What happened?

The recession happened, that's what. The gap from the original 77 clinics to the present 33 occurred when venture capital-funded clinics had their funds dry up amid the credit crunch of late 2008 and they haven't returned yet. Although Wal-Mart sees health clinics as a still-untapped opportunity in its stores, they won't be coming to every possible Wal-Mart location any time soon. Indeed, former CEO Lee Scott said that it would take five to seven years to get 2,000 clinics inside Wal-Mart locations. Wonder where that estimate is now?

Last week, Best Buy Inc. (NYSE: BBY) CEO Brad Anderson ceded the throne to 24-year Best Buy vet Brian Dunn, who took over as CEO. Dunn, who started with the largest consumer electronics chain in the U.S. by belting out the theme to Miami Vice to amp up home theater sales in the 1980s, has stated that he wants to "connect" every consumer that steps inside Best Buy's doors. That is, make sure wireless phones, PCs, and home theater become the chain's biggest opportunities. In other words, take advantage of the "three screens of opportunity."

Best Buy Inc. (NYSE: BBY) has seen resurgent competition from mass retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT); are the employees of either retailer better? Best Buy seems to think so. Some of the newer advertising indicates that Best Buy employees are better at helping customers than Wal-Mart employees.

Although Wal-Mart has greatly enhanced the consumer electronics sections of its supercenter locations in the last 18 months, do the employees really know the ins and outs of all the new technology? Wal-Mart seems to really want to step up its competitiveness against Best Buy and others, but does it have the backbone to do so outside of just the products?

Research In Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ: RIMM) saw a solid Q1 period, but corporate customer additions dropped while consumer customer additions soared (well, that was the implication anyway). Although the BlackBerry line of devices is selling quite well, RIM announced that it may not be able to meet Q2 targets of $0.98 EPS and $3.61 billion in sales.

RIM executives referenced a quarter that ends August 29 of $0.94 to $1.03 EPS and $3.45 billion to $3.7 billion in sales. It's leaving the possibility that the spending it's seeing to develop the "spectacular" road map ahead -- combined with intense competition with the iPhone and the newer Palm Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) Pre -- may cause a dip in the current quarter.

The father of the PDF document, Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE), is starting to push further into the web-based document creation business. That strategy puts it squarely in the cross-hairs of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and its excellent Google Docs product, as well as software giant Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), which is set to release a major online component with Office 2010.

Adobe indicated that a fee-based version its new online initiatives would allow businesses to covert all kinds of documents to the de-facto PDF standard, as well as hold online meetings via Acrobat.com.

When News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) bought MySpace.com for over $500 million back in 2005, some said it was the way Rupert Murdoch would charge into the digital media audience business in a big way. While that was true at the time, the digital world and its audience can become fickle and change rapidly as new web-based properties develop. It's pretty obvious by now that Facebook has leaped past MySpace and is "the place" to be when it comes to social networking interaction (although Twitter is garnering all the buzz presently).

Why Did MySpace lose its way? MySpace evolved to become a portal, offering music downloads and other goodies, while Facebook kept its social networking status as a place where friends and associates could virtually connect. And there you have it -- MySpace didn't evolve as trends were created and rapidly changed.

Palm Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) is just under a week into the launch of its groundbreaking Pre smartphone, and so far the wireless handset is a great seller for exclusive partner Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S). Former Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) executive Jon Rubinstein, who was brought in to reinvigorate Palm and who is largely credited with the Pre, will now take over the Palm CEO spot from longtime CEO Ed Colligan.