Go West

Where's my mortgage moratorium?

Will presidential candidates say anything to pander to voters? Last week I took John McCain to task for his dumb idea of spending $300 billion to buy mortgages so that so-called homeowners can be bailed out instead of Wall Street banks. The highlights of the McCain plan are the determination of who is creditworthy as well as a pre-determined, finger-in-the-wind interest rate of 5%, which sounds so attractive to me MORE

Scenes from the apocalypse

I've been trying hard to understand John McCain's mortgage proposal. Here are my two favorite elements: 1) that all troubled but heretofore creditworthy mortgage holders would be eligible to participate; and 2) that once the government purchased their mortgage it would then lend the money again, pegged to the "new" value and, importantly, at a 30-year-fixed rate of 5%.

Let's take these one at a time. McCain's definition of creditworthiness seems MORE

Why I still don't use Facebook

I have 251 "friends" on Facebook. That's incredible to me, since I never use Facebook. On my Facebook home page, I also have 103 friend requests I'm not likely to accept, 66 "other requests" I'll probably never read and four suggestions about which I have no intention of learning.

Once, I probably could be accused of not "getting" Facebook. That's not true anymore. I get it. I think it's not only MORE

Why Obama won debate No. 2

Tuesday night's "town-hall" meeting from Nashville had all the hallmarks of what voters have come to dislike about these non-debates. The candidates often avoided directly answering questions, they broke the rules their campaigns had agreed to, and they speechified rather than engage in a serious discussion of the issues.

And yet, for one moment, Barack Obama showed why he is ahead in the polls. He did it by giving the single best MORE

How the Apple iPhone ecosystem works

This past February an excitable Belgian software executive named Bart Decrem and a quiet Australian ex-McKinsey consultant named Andrew Lacy had an epiphany. A few months earlier, in November, Steve Jobs had said Apple (AAPL) eventually would allow software developers to write programs for the company's elegant iPhone. Jobs didn't say when, and he didn't share details of how Apple would work with outsiders. But it was an exciting prospect MORE

Credit crisis, explained

Three great articles in the current issue of Fortune Magazine will do a whole lot to illuminate the muddy subject of the enveloping credit crunch: our stories on gloomy banking analyst Meredith Whitney, a down-and-out bank in Arizona, and the rise and fall of Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns. Read them all, and while the entire credit crunch won't be crystal clear, you'll suddenly feel like you're beginning MORE

Another view on Twitter

Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Cisco (CSCO), is an avid user of Twitter. I had asked her by e-mail to tell me why she likes it and she sent me the following. I've got some thoughts about what she writes here, but rather than prejudice readers, I'll ask for your opinions first. Please use the comment box on this blog (which allows for far more than 140 characters) MORE

Will Twitter make it?

On one of my visits to Twitter's hip South of Market offices in San Francisco I got into a conversation about blogging and Twittering with one of the founders of both trends, Evan Williams. He founded Blogger, which he sold to Google (GOOG), and owned the company from which Twitter hatched a couple years ago. He told me he'd grown weary of discussing and defending blogging, which I can understand. MORE

More from Brainstorm Tech

Fortune's Brainstorm Tech wrapped three weeks ago, and I promised to share my observations, which somehow got stuck in my notebook. My first report, on bloggers, making money on the Net, and poor VCs, ran here. With apologies, here's the rest:

Dinner with Jeff. A few years ago I attended a Microsoft (MSFT) annual dinner at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and to my great surprise found myself MORE

Brainstorm round-up: Part I

We came. We saw. We Brainstormed.

Fortune Magazine held its annual Brainstorm Tech conference last week in Half Moon Bay, Calif., over the hill from the heart of Silicon Valley and just down the seaside road from San Francisco. As usually happens at Fortune events, we put together a wonderfully eclectic mix of heavy hitters from industry, big thinkers on issues most of us didn't know existed, and the occasional oddball MORE